


Worldfall

by ThuktunFlishithy



Series: Worldfall [1]
Category: Footfall - Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, Worldwar/Colonization Series - Harry Turtledove
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Alien Invasion, Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Alien Invasion, Epistolary, War, global perspective, lots of characters, super political
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 42,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26604337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThuktunFlishithy/pseuds/ThuktunFlishithy
Summary: August 2014. Exhilaration and worry envelop the world when a massive spacecraft is detected entering the solar system, the first proof of civilization beyond the Earth. Then humanity receives a shock even greater than before, when an entire fleet is detected at the edge of the solar system, six years away. After waiting for so long for first contact, humanity makes it twice within as many months.Then the shock and awe turns to fear as they realize neither party is friendly.Recounted twenty years after the bloodiest conflict in human, and alien, history, Worldfall is an epistolary account of the twin invasions of Earth, recounting the three-way war between humanity, the Race, and the Chtaptisk Fithp as they vie for control over a pale blue dot. From the preparations, to the conclusion, to the post-war world and all the details in-between, it is clear that the histories of these civilizations will be forever intertwined.
Series: Worldfall [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1935370
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	1. Discoveries

**Paulson I**

_The sun is low on the sky when I finally pull into the Mauna Kea Surveillance Observatory's parking lot. While technically still an independent facility, it is now under the partial jurisdiction of the TGDF, as to scan the skies for potential threats._

_Dr. Jennifer Paulson is an older woman, with streaks of grey in her dark brown hair. The long years have visibly taken their toll since the old photos, but there remains a lively expression on her face when she greets me at the entrance. After a small exchange, we move inside for the interview._

**Q: So, let me begin with, well, the beginning. Is it true that you were the first to detect them?**

A: The first? No. Multiple observation stations across the world detected it, starting maybe a month before we got to it. But we were definitely the ones to really piece it together, and we were the ones who made it official.

**Q: What caused your team to piece it together before other observers?**

A: Well, other observers were not dedicated to searching for deep space objects like the telescope I worked at was- it was honestly an incidental finding by observation stations meant for studying distant stars or other galaxies. The initial observations just assumed it was a Trans-Neptunian object, sweeping down from the Oort Cloud on a ten-thousand year orbit. However, it _was_ noted to be a bit off. Not quite right in albedo, and some unusual results from spectrographs.

So, early August we decided to take a look at it, and immediately realized something was off. Albedo-wise, it was _very_ dark, on par with a C-type asteroid, but the spectrometry results didn't indicate it being primarily composed of carbon. Even that could've been natural, however. What really got our attention, thanks to a radio telescope we had, was the radiation.

**Q: Radiation? As in from the ship's drive?**

A: Oh, no, the drive had been deactivated long before. This was from the heat that any manned spacecraft radiates away, which is definitely a lot hotter than your average comet, as well as the ramscoop acting like a sort of magnetic parachute against the solar wind, bleeding off excess velocity as it dove towards the sun. They had deliberately done that, both to conserve resources by not using the drive, and to make their arrival less conspicuous. If they had used the drive, we probably would've seen them even earlier, and we'd already detected them about twenty AUs from the Sun.

**Q: Why so early, if they were so far away?**

[Chuckles] It's not like the old pre-war movies, where flying saucers can appear right above the White House before anyone notices. Space is not exactly _empty_ , but that's largely when dealing with immense velocities and distances. As far as observation in the solar system is concerned, things like actual spacecraft, which produce radiation and light? That can be detected from billions of miles away, or even light years if the drive is powerful enough.

**Q: How long did it take for you and your team to realize what you were looking at?**

A: Six hours. As soon as we detected the heat coming off it, we made a few phone calls, had some other observatories use their radio telescopes, yadda yadda yadda... We, uh, we had a bit of trouble believing what we were seeing. I mean, we came up with so many other ideas as to what it could've been, only to write them off when we realized the pieces didn't fit, until we were left with...

_She claps her hands together._

Aliens.

**Q: That must've been an exciting moment at the observatory when you realized it.**

A: [Laughs] I was like a little girl! We got out the champagne for a bit, after we sent copies of our data to other observatories to confirm, which didn't take long. At the time, we were so excited about the prospect of alien life. Not just some microbes under a rock on Mars, but an intelligent species that was coming _here_. There's an old picture around here that shows me posing with the astronomical plates, and I'm actually crying. It was intense, in a good way.

Then, someone contacted the feds, and suddenly we got phone calls from some _very_ severe sounding people with lots of questions. Questions that really killed the mood.

**Q: What sort of questions?**

A: Have you told the public yet? How long until the public finds out? Do you have a trajectory for the spacecraft? Did you find any evidence of weapons?

**Q: What did you tell them?**

A: The truth. That we didn't know anything about the ship except that it was about a mile long and a mile wide, and that it was decelerating. That if the public didn't already know from some excited intern at our facility, they would learn from the observatories in other countries. The news would quickly spread, especially on the internet, and there'd be a lot of suspicion about any silence on the matter. There'd be no way for them to contain a leak that big, even if they tried.

That's why they decided to reveal our findings the next day, in a Presidential address. I was excited to see my face on national television, even if I was also pretty nervous. The news practically exploded, with everyone abuzz about the discovery. I mean, think about how _huge_ of an impact the revelation would have... _did have_ , on the world! The religions, the philosophies, the way we see ourselves in the universe. Suddenly, the galaxy just became a smaller place, all overnight.

 **Q: So, that was the** **_Flishithy_ ** **. How long until the Conquest Fleet was detected?**

A: Two months, just in time for the initial freak-out to slightly weaken. We were watching the big ship like a hawk, with all the reflectors focused on it. Within three weeks we had just about pinned down they had come from Alpha Centauri, or at the very least had made a stop there. It had just swung around the Sun and was careening towards Saturn when someone detected the Fleet. It was the Chinese who spotted that first, and they sent the findings to us for confirmation.

_Paulson sighs._

That... that was scary. Mind you, we didn't know anything about what the snouts were packing. If we did, there would've been a _real_ panic, not just celebrations and debauchery. At the time, we thought it was a contact vessel, or maybe a scientific expedition. After all, it was only one ship, and the size made sense for a ramjet. I mean, we _thought_ about invasion, but it was at the back of our heads. We dismissed it as a silly thought, fit for a dumb blockbuster.

When we detected 2500 sources of light in the outer boundary of the Oort Cloud, each one hugely Doppler-shifted...

We were dumbfounded, naturally. We had just finally made first contact after lord knows how many millennia of waiting, and suddenly we get another one in just months? And we knew they had to be a different species, too. Not just because it appeared they were coming from the direction of Cetus, but because of the way they were arriving.

**Q: How so?**

They weren't using magsails to decelerate, not at the velocities they were pulling. We'd already estimated that the Flishithy had been going about 0.1 _c_ at best based on their deceleration, while these were at five times the delta v _while_ decelerating. Based on the spectrography work we did, with the absence of hydrogen lines, we figured out pretty quick that they were using incredibly effective photon rockets. That was, pardon the pun, light-years beyond our own technology.

Seeing that difference in technology only made the sinking feeling in everyone's guts worse. I mean, we realized pretty quickly that such a fleet had to be meant for something aggressive. Why send that many ships, each of them bigger than an aircraft carrier, if you just wanted to talk? Why send that many to explore? The costs in fuel and energy would be enormous, far too much to justify anything other than some manner of colonization. Whether they knew about us or not, or if they were coming specifically _for_ us...

_Paulson takes a sip from her water bottle, then glances out the window._

The atmosphere here changed in a heartbeat. One of my interns, bright-eyed kid, actually swan-dived off a ledge after a night of hard drinking. Can't blame him. As far as we knew back then, if an alien species could cross the void like that, and they wanted us dead... it'd be like a war between ants and boots. We were almost glad when the feds took over. It felt like I could breathe, even if it'd only be until they arrived.

**Q: And how long would that be?**

A: Six years, and we were lucky. I was twenty-nine when we made the discovery, and I looked fifty when everything went to hell.

-/-\\-

**Villaseñor I**

_Though quite busy as a superintendent and space traffic controller, respectively, Ricardo and Isabella Villaseñor still find time to invite me over to their home near Santiago, Chile. The pair, married for more than twenty years, sit beside each other at the small table in their dining room, a pot of coffee and some cake between us._

**Q: Thank you for your time. To begin, I'd like to ask the two of you about life shortly before the Discovery.**

A (Ricardo): Oh, we call it the Revelation here.

A (Isabella): Ricardo here thinks it's more ominous, but I like it because it has some nice gravitas to it. But I guess that's kinda sidetracking there-

A (Ricardo): It's absolutely sidetracking.

A (Isabella): Shush, you. Anyway, before the Revelation? Well, I was getting ready to start my last year of high school.

A (Ricardo): First semester at Universidad de Chile for me. I was planning on getting into tv.

**Q: Pre-Revelation, what would you say your main day to day concerns were? What about the news?**

A (Isabella): Personally, I wasn't very much into the news at the time. I was more concerned about things like schoolwork, my father's health, drama in my friend group, that sort of thing. I had more than enough on my plate as is; no need to worry about problems other people had.

A (Ricardo): I paid a bit more attention to the news. Things were, ah, definitely different back then. Even when the Message Bearer was discovered, I felt like it only dominated the news for like, a week? Two weeks. Not to say it wasn't huge, mind you. It was huge. I remember actually doing a little fist pump when I first heard about it, I was that excited.

A (Isabella): That was the first time I was really interested in the news. It was all we talked about for days on end. Feelings-wise, that was probably the best time in terms of how we viewed alien life. There were parties, ads, viral videos on the internet... People were excited.

A (Ricardo): I even attended a viewing party, trying to find the ship with a telescope before we realized it was waaaay too small and far away for that. Didn't stop me from binge-watching all the sci-fi I could, though. Street vendors were selling memorabilia that was often barely even space-themed, I saw people put pins on their backpacks with little green men, there was that big thing in Roswell...

**Q: So, why do you say it only dominated the news for a week or so, if it was so big?**

A (Isabella): Like I said, so many problems on our plate.

A (Ricardo): Even after the first week it was easily the hottest thing to talk about, and it was still a big part of the news. But my love is right; there was still so much stuff happening in the world that it went from the only thing we talked and thought about, to one of them. Back then, we had that epidemic in West Africa that had people freaking out. Ebola, was it? I think it was ebola before it got wiped out. There was the Russians, the old Russians, annexing Crimea, and that whole thing in the Middle East with some Islamic State kicking up trouble.

**Q: Was there worry about an invasion back then?**

A (Isabella): Not really, no. My local priest had a sermon about that, and it messed with my folks, but I was shying away from the church back then.

A (Ricardo): Some of the people on the news and internet talked about it, but for the most part it people weren't that worried. The experts were sure the Message Bearer was an exploratory ship, maybe even unmanned. After all, the trajectory looked like it was heading towards Saturn, not Earth. Things only changed when the Conquest Fleet was discovered.

**Q: That was going to be my next question. Do you remember when the Conquest Fleet was discovered?**

A (Ricardo): My god, do I.

A (Isabella): Everyone remembers that day as crystal clear as the other big days.

A (Ricardo): I was walking to my communications class when my phone buzzed. And then buzzed, and buzzed, and _buzzed_. First it was the news notification, the emergency address our president gave about the Fleet. 2500 ships at the very edge of the solar system, almost certainly not from the same ones who sent the other. That was what the news said, at first. The texts I got from friends, on the other hand, had all sorts of truths and panicked mistakes in them. My uncle said they had weapons on them. A friend thought they were going to arrive in two weeks.

I don't know how long I was standing there, reading. A while, definitely. I remember looking up to see that everyone else on campus had done the same thing.

A (Isabella): I was in my last class of the day. The kids in the class who had phones, and my teacher, all started looking down, then looking around. I ended up peering over a friend's shoulder as we read the news.

A (Ricardo): Immediately, I felt like I was falling and about to hit the ground. Like I was getting electrocuted. There was this poor man, though I should say boy since he was my age, and he started screaming. Sobbing. The sheer dread of what was coming hit him first, and it damn broke him.

A (Isabella): Class got dismissed, and we all hurried out, talking with each other. I decided to run home.

A (Ricardo): I didn't even wait for anything official. I just ran back to my dorm, grabbed my bike, and pedaled back to my place. To the devil with communications class, I was thinking. By the time I got back, a good two hours later, the riots were already starting. Real riots. Not violent protests, like we've had. Just panicked looting, fighting... someone tried to grab my bike, an older fat guy, and I just shoved my hand against his face and kept on pedaling. By god, you'd think the invasion had already started if you'd looked at the streets.

A (Isabella): I spent the night sitting on the couch, eyes glued to the tv. My father, who'd been managing to keep away from alcohol while recovering from his heart attack, came back with a beer and sat down next to me. He didn't say anything that night, but he shared some of the beer with me, figuring it'd keep me calm. I'd never drunk before, but I must've put away half the bottle. Helped me sleep through the chaos outside, with yelling, breaking, and even a gunshot here and there.

At least one good thing came out of that first day's panic, though.

**Q: Which was?**

A (Ricardo): Just a kid panicking.

A (Isabella): My best friend of ten years called me a little before midnight, blabbering about how he'd secretly been in love with me, but he was too scared to say it, but because the world was going to end in a few years he wanted me to know...

_She clasps Ricardo's hand._

A (Ricardo): Never thought an alien invasion would help me make the best decision of my life.

-/-\\-

**Tashyamp I**

_Often found giving lectures in Yimptunf, the capital of the Fithp Nation in Brasil, Tashyamp nevertheless makes time every day to return home and attend to her children, alongside her current husband Shanyft-yamp. The gap in pre-war and post-war fithp is never as visible as it is with the former Breaker and her children, the latter of whom wear clothing derived from human styles and bear Race-inspired makeup on their trunks, in stark contrast to their near-naked mother._

_After corralling her children into their scoop, she has me sit down on the grass with her as she sips her tea._

**Q: Thank you for your time. I know you're quite busy, so I'll try to be brief. When did the Chtaptisk Fithp learn of humanity's civilization?**

A: Very soon after the sleeper herd had arisen from their deathsleep, after Pastempeh-keph became Herdmaster. This was as we passed the orbit of the seventh planet, and engaged in a cursory passive sweep of the system for signs of technology. I do not know which fi' had chanced upon the faint radio signals emanating from Winterhome, but I do know it was brought to the Herdmaster's attention quite swiftly.

It was cause for some concern, but not as great as what the Home fithp must have experienced. We had expected there would be some manner of civilization on your world.

**Q: From the _thuktunthp_ , yes?**

A: Indeed. The _thuktun_ we bore had told us of your species. The Herd Who Walked Before knew of humanity, and had even provided etchings of your likeness in the stone. We knew we would have to subdue you, and had toyed with the possibility that you had also been given the _thuktunthp_. We had come prepared for a struggle.

Nevertheless, the Advisor had raised objections, worried that a fithp capable of producing detectable radio signals may be a strong herd, strong enough to overcome us. He continued to push for our colonization of the asteroids.

**Q: How pronounced was this divide? What side did you take?**

A: The divide was not particularly great at first, only growing with revelations. The shipborn knew what living in space was like. The first generation, the one who remembered Hearth as _Thuktun Flishithy_ left for Winterhome, resented their life in the cold halls, and that resentment was passed down to their young. It was why, I feel, Pastempeh-keph was so intent on claiming Winterhome.

Likewise, the sleeper herd was split on the matter, and many were swayed by the shipborn. They remembered Hearth like the first generation of shipborn had, and now could see the resentment living in space had instilled upon us. It was why I was swayed to side with the conquest.

**Q: When did your research on humanity begin?**

A: After we swung around your sun and dropped our siskyissputh, hund, our ramjet into its corona. By then, your herd was essentially handing my work to me. For a short while, we were bombarded by directed radio signals, from what we now know to be various governmental and individual bodies. To us, it was confusing, often contradictory. Images of peace alongside images of war, complicated messages in languages we didn't understand alongside rudimentary lessons in communication. Basic mathematics were the first ones sent our way, and that simply made us wonder if you thought us incapable of basic geometry.

Of great confusion was the porm, no, the porn. For some time we theorized that had to teach your young how to mate with demonstrative videos.

**Q: I was under the impression that the fithp also produce sexual artwork.**

A: We do, both with the mating sculptures of before and the... work being created now. However, that is largely during musth, and the sheer volume of porn sent our way was confusing.

I digress. The point of the matter is that the signals sent our way made it easier for us to try and decipher your languages, as well as to understand your herd's culture. Even after Winterhome became silent, we had a great body of information to work with. By the end of the first year we had breakers with rudimentary understanding of the largest languages of humanity. English, Zhongwén, Manak Hindi, and others. Personally, I had studied to learn to speak Hindi and al-'arabiyyah.

Language was not the only difficulty we faced. It took us far too much time to realize that your species produced copious amounts of fiction, and so we had to try and ascertain what was real and what was a Dreamer's fantasy. The stories that were a bit closer to reality in terms of technology were quite frustrating, as it made it hard for us to determine your actual military capacity. I actually became quite fond of a Hindi-language film called _Three Idiots_.

**Q: I would like to go back to something you said earlier, about Earth becoming silent?**

A: Yes. By the time _Thuktun Flishithy_ was in orbit around the ringed planet, the radio transmissions had stopped. Even our passive listening was becoming less fruitful. I believe part of it may be in part due to some of your leaders noting our destruction of our ramjet, but it was quite clearly largely due to the Conquest Fleet from the Home fithp. You did not want them to know much about your world.

**Q: Did you know of the Race from the _thuktunthp_ as well?**

A: No. The Herd Who Walked Before must not have discovered them or their client species. Perhaps their systems were farther away during their time. We learned about them through your own transmissions, catching a brief glimpse of the panic they had incited. That led to much confusion and lack of ease in our ranks, and it only got worse as we continued studying your transmissions.

**Q: Could you elaborate on that?**

A: Your first transmissions had already made us feel uneasy. Not only because it was proof that the element of surprise had been lost, and that you were advanced enough to track and communicate with us, but the very fact that you were attempting to talk before fighting was disturbing. We are a young herd. The idea of herds wildly different from us was something for Dreamers, but it soon became an unpleasant reality.

It only became worse as we deciphered your transmissions. It showed us a world where herds didn't automatically subsume others, where the inducted were almost never loyal. With that and your clearly advanced technology, it was sobering proof that a conquest would not be the smooth process we had imagined, and that we may lose more than we anticipated.

The Home fithp added to our worry. Their photon rockets was beyond us, and so we worried that perhaps their weapons would also exceed ours. The fact that you had sent us messages of peace, only to panic and go silent at their discovery, cemented that concern. Yet, I believe it also helped the Herdmaster to stay on his course.

**Q: In what regard?**

A: He spoke to us often of how these two factors that, on their lonesome could have spelled disaster, would instead negate each other. Between an enigmatic and advanced force, and an entire world of seeming rogues, there could be a chance for our victory. After all, it was clear to us that they also desired Winterhome. It was likely that war between the two herds would be likely, and that they would weaken each other.

Enough for our herd to then come in and subsume both.

And so, despite my own misgivings, and the increasing number of dissidents, we continued to plan for the conquest. We spent years in the system, resupplying, training, and preparing a war-ending weapon. All the while, I studied your kind, and wondered what was happening on your cold blue world.

-/-\\-

**Front Page of Reddit, October 13th 2014**

**1\. (101k) R.E.M - It's The End Of The World [youtube]  
** Posted to /r/videos three hours ago - 2088 comments

 **2\. (221k) Over two thousand ships spotted at the edge of the solar system, likely to arrive in six years. [bbc]  
** Posted to /r/worldnews four hours ago - 198189 comments

 **3\. (201k) FIRST PICTURE OF THE FLEET [imgur]  
** Posted to /r/invasion one hour ago - 84819 comments

 **4\. (69k) Presidential Address on Fleet [cnn]  
** Posted to /r/politics one hour ago - 4290 comments

 **5\. (71k) Martial law has been declared in over a hundred countries [nyt]  
** Posted to /r/worldnews three hours ago - 8818 comments

 **6\. (55k) Two fucking alien contacts? Are you kidding me? [self]  
** Posted to /r/firstcontact one hour ago - 1911 comments

 **7\. (88k) China has shut down the internet across the entire country, inside sources claim [bbc]  
** Posted to /r/worldnews four hours ago - 5929 comments

 **8\. (44k) Please, just say anything to give me hope [self]  
** Posted to /r/self two hours ago - 18870 comments

 **9\. (21k) C'mon Will Smith, do your thing [imgur]  
** Posted to /r/MURICA two hours ago - 1010 comments

 **10\. (77k) The British PM has reportedly hanged himself [bbc]  
** Posted to /r/invasion two hours ago - 9913 comments

 **11\. (9k) SECOND ALIEN SPECIES SPECULATION MEGATHREAD [self]  
** Posted to /r/firstcontact thirty minutes ago - 1901 comments

 **12\. (82k) REMINDER THAT THEY MAY BE FRIENDLY SO KEEP CALM [self]  
** Posted to /r/blog one hour ago - 28890 comments

 **13\. (31k) Times Square is on fire right now [imgur]  
** Posted to /r/pics three hours ago - 5129 comments

 **14\. (11k) Army recruitment went up 2200% today [cnn]  
** Posted to /r/news four hours ago - 4429 comments

 **15\. (33k) Indian President proposes sending alliance offer to the first alien ship [bbc]  
** Posted to /r/invasion two hours ago - 8165 comments

 **16\. (61k) Russian forces reportedly pulling out of Crimea, sources say [nyt]  
** Posted to /r/worldpolitics one hour ago - 7161 comments

 **17\. (21k) Dow Jones drops 44% [cnn]  
** Posted to /r/news three hours ago - 442 comments

 **18\. (11k) Coming out of the closet cuz no one's gonna notice with this [self]  
** Posted to /r/self one hour ago - 6168 comments

 **19\. (30k) WE WILL NOT  
** Posted to /r/invasion one hour ago - 1776 comments

 **20\. (29k) GO QUIETLY INTO  
** Posted to /r/invasion one hour ago - 1776 comments

 **21\. (30k) THAT GOOD NIGHT  
** Posted to /r/invasion one hour ago - 1776 comments

 **22\. (22k) What are some things to give us hope? [self]  
** Posted to /r/askreddit one hour ago - 17891 comments

 **23\. (40k) IT'S HAPPENING [imgur]  
** Posted to /r/memes two hours ago - 717 comments

 **24\. (55k) They probably want us to panic. Keep calm and we can get through this. [self]  
** Posted to /r/invasion one hour ago - 188 comments

 **25\. (11k) Putting together the Team [imgur]  
** Posted to /r/invasionmemes two hours ago - 817 comments

-/-\\-

**Erewlo I**

_Short, even for his species, Subleader Erewlo is rather skittish as he cautiously waves me down. He has chosen a public park in Riyadh for our meeting. "Some of the other males get upset when I discuss this, and I think having a Tosevite with me in public is safer than in enclosed spaces," he explains._

**Q: Good morning, Subleader. Are you ready for our discussion?**

A: Yes, yes. Sssa... do you wish for something to drink? Are you comfortable? I know you don't like the heat as much, and I'd hate to be a bother, so if-

**Q: I'm fine, but thank you for your concern. Now then, I would like to start with the beginning. When did the Conquest Fleet first realize that Earth had become industrialized?**

A: Too late.

_He pauses for some time._

It was in flight year 331, going by our time, so perhaps six years before the war by your reckoning. It was very soon after we had begun decelerating in the Ppilov Scattering2. I should know, considering that it got me woken up years ahead of schedule.

**Q: By whom?**

A: By the ship's computer. I was situated on the flagship itself, the _127th Emperor Hetto_. Being woken up by the computer during the flight isn't actually that unusual, you see. Whenever the automated systems detect an error, or something that could become an error, the appropriate crewmales are woken up from coldsleep as to handle the issue. Due to the reliability of everything we make, serious issues are almost never found, but we still are woken up just to be sure. Normally it's simply a small issue with heatshielding or the like.

So I was not terribly worried when the computer woke me up. I had initially assumed that there may be an issue with our communications laser, meant to transmit messages back to Home. The statistics supported such a likelihood, as I was instructed that every ship likely suffers from minor communications malfunction once during a fifteen year time span.

_He shudders._

Then I investigated the problem, and realized it was not a flaw in communications.

**Q: Why did the computer only alert you, a communications officer? Was the computer designed to alert command in case of unexpected contact?**

A: No, of course not. We were the Race! No one else was supposed to have radio. When the computer detected radio signals not coming from Race starships, it simply assumed that there was an error of some sort and woke me up. I had to do the diagnostics myself, three hours of programming, in order to find out that the source of the 'malfunction' were artificial radio waves emanating from Tosev Three.

**Q: What did you do when you realized what was happening?**

A: I curled up into a ball. Like this.

_He demonstrates._

For two hours.

**Q: Was it that great a shock?**

A: No. I mean, yes. Yes it was a tremendous shock. But it wasn't that. I was pulled in so many directions by my liver, thinking. Is Tosev Three actually industrialized? Did I make a mistake? If I did, how do I fix it? If it's not a mistake, who do I go to? Chain of command said nothing about discovering that the primitives you were meant to conquer within a week of landing had radio.

It didn't help that I was alone in an empty, dark ship. Lights are turned off to conserve power, and there were only five other males awake at the time, doing routine check ups on the coldsleep capsules and other subsystems. I wondered if I didn't wake up properly, and was simply hallucinating.

I was only broken out of my panic when I received communications from other ships in the fleet.

**Q: Were they other communications officers?**

_He coughs affirmatively._

A: They had all been awoken from coldsleep for the same reason I had, and all had been faced with the same dilemma. That was the moment of clarity I needed, the proof that I was not egg-addled. And so it was my decision to alert Fleetlord Atvar regarding the new development.

**Q: Did you go directly to the Fleetlord?**

A: No. I went for Shiplord Kirel, and then had him alert the Fleetlord.

_He rocks gently._

But he decided to have me in the room as we woke him from coldsleep, so I could provide technical details. I was shaking with nerves as I told him of the artificial radio waves, and of how the tiny Doppler-shifts indicated that they had come from Tosev Three.

**Q: How did he react?**

A: He thought Kirel and I had played an elaborate prank on him! That's how impossible the reality before us was. The Fleetlord, brightest of our kind for tens of light-years around, thought that your species becoming industrialized was nothing but a fiction meant to alarm him.

_His rocking picks up pace._

He was grumbling about gross insubordination as he tapped at the datapad and read the report, until he saw how many other technicians signed on it. Then, he became very silent. Both eye turrets were on the report, not even lending one to us as he mulled it over. When I saw the Fleetlord, who should've known what to do more than anyone else in the Fleet, start to pluck nervously at his chin scales? I fainted.

**Q: What happened after you woke up?**

A: After I woke up? I don't remember. I was simply put back into coldsleep, with perhaps no waking time beforehand.

_He stops his rocking, and forces himself to relax his posture._

I wish I had woken up back at Home.

1 According to Race astronomical data, it takes their homeworld of Home approximately 0.4991 Earth years to complete one revolution around their sun, Tau Ceti.

2 The Race term for both the Oort Cloud and the Scattered Disc, the outermost regions of a stellar system. The Solar System's Oort Cloud extends approximately 20,000 astronomical units from the Sun. _Voyager 1_ , a pre-war probe erroneously considered the first human-made interstellar object, reached only 167 astronomical units before finally losing power in 2025.

-/-\\-

_The Beijing Psychiatric Hospital is a state-of-the art facility, meant to put patients at comfort during their stays here. Wáng Yèwèn certainly looks comfortable as I enter his room. The surroundings are surprisingly furnished with calligraphy and paintings of cities that he's made. Numerous medical textbooks and sociology papers are neatly put away in a bookcase, which has a number of family photos on top._

_Yèwèn is sitting up calmly in bed. His hair is clipped short, with streaks of grey running through it, but there is an unexpected vividness in his eyes. They look like the eyes of a jolly old man, wrinkled by smiles and laughter. It is a startling juxtaposition with the hideous burn running up one side of his neck, as well as to the straightjacket binding his arms for the duration of our meeting._

**Q: Good afternoon, Wàng Xiānshēng.**

A: Good afternoon. Your tones could use some work, but the effort is appreciated. Most foreigners I've spoken with were not willing to try. Of course, I digress. I take it you are here to ask me about the war?

**Q: Yes and no. I was hoping to get a little insight into what was going on before the war, first.**

A: Ah. I suppose all the big stories begin with something small, do they not? The best ones, of course.

**Q: You could interpret it that way if you like.**

A: Then I shall do so; it makes it much better to tell my story. What exactly do you want to know?

**Q: It'd be best to start with what the public was feeling in the initial months of the discovery.**

A: That was a late 2014. Chilly weather, especially where I was. You see, I was born in Chóngqìng, but I went to the capital to study medicine. I was planning on becoming a surgeon, though I'd always held a fascination with sociology. Of course, there was no money in sociology, and so my parents made sure that I didn't take any classes as a distraction while I was abroad.

You seem... impatient. I suppose I'm, how you'd say? Dawdling. Lost in nostalgia. I missed home dearly, and I miss it now. Yet, I was making friends in school, and classes were going well. That was when the news arrived.

**Q: How would you say people in China had taken it?**

A: People? I feel that is... too broad. Very generalizing. Each one is like a world unto themselves. I suppose the most apt analogy would be... yes, a _mosaic_. Each tile is a different color, or has different colors in different ratios, but when put together, they can form a picture.

That picture was cautious, and more than a little fearful, but ultimately hopeful. There were those who'd been waiting their whole lives to see alien life, hoping to find peace in the stars. Even those were not readers of science fiction, or focused too much on the more mundane matters of the world, were suddenly finding their eyes drawn upwards.

The internet was full of speculation. The part of me that was fascinated with sociology found itself at the forefront of my mind. After all, what could be as interesting a sociological topic as an alien mind? I knew my way around the censorship placed by my government, and I was constantly on message boards, discussing the news. We were constantly asking each other so many questions. Why were they here? What kind of technology did they have? What did they look like? Did they have religion? Did they feel the same emotions as us?

There were quite a few jokes and comparisons drawn to a popular science fiction series at the time, which featured aliens from Alpha Centauri. Most of the jokes were half-seriously hoping that they would be quite different from the aliens in that series.

Television was much the same. There were politicians advocating a military build-up, politicians advocating the creation of a international message of peace to send to our visitors, and everything in between. Ultimately, however, even in my country people were hopeful. Why would a species capable of crossing an ocean of stars want to conquer a world? What could they possibly hope to gain?

I was personally excited, you see. If they landed, wherever they were, I wanted to be there, to ask them the questions that burned in my chest like hot coals.

**Q: What changed that?**

A: The Conquest Fleet.

_For a moment, his face contorts with pain and grief, only to be replaced by a chilly anger. His voice drags along the back of my neck like a knife made of ice._

For a mission of peace, one would expect a single ship, or perhaps a small handful. Even interstellar expeditions would not require an absurd amount of material or manpower, especially if their work was more of a matter of communication than anything really physical.

There was no denying that hundreds of ships would not have peaceful intent.

That was when the panic began. It was not as bad in my country as it was in many third world nations, but it was not pleasant. There were stampedes in food stores as people tried to purchase supplies, and looting when some less civilized people felt there was no need to hold on to the law. There were even bombings in the west, where things are already contentious. Tibet, especially, was becoming more blood-soaked than usual.

I saw little of the panic first hand. The government put guards around the universities, and we were barred from leaving. We were not as frightened as the others; we knew that it would be six years before the real trouble began. Still, there was a sense of... unease. For all we knew, the war would be little more than pest control on their part, and that we only had six more years to enjoy life before its swift end.

And yet, and yet... I had been hopeful about the first ship. It was clearly not from the same star system, and some remained calm enough to appreciate the magnitude of two entire alien civilizations making contact with us at the same time. Some even thought that the first ship would be peaceful, and help us agains the coming fleet. I certainly did.

There was some worry about that ship at the time, however. I remember reading on message boards on how the ship had shrank after swinging around the sun, as if it had deposited a fuel tank or ramjet. Regardless of intent, it indicated to some that this ship was planning on staying in our solar system.

Then came Cassini. The probe, I believe, was in the middle of its second mission extension. By a stroke of what must have been divine providence, it was on a route that allowed a flyby of the first alien ship, and the world waited with bated breath as the first pictures came.

**Q: It only managed to take a few before it was destroyed, I believe.**

A: And yet, what an impact those handful of photos had! Imagine the terror billions felt when we saw a mile-long monstrosity of a spacecraft, armored like a battleship and covered in what could only be weapons. It looked like something that could crush nations, and to know that it would be coming our way...

_He breathes deeply through his nose._

The draft opened up shortly after that. Against the suggestion of my parents, I signed up. And the rest... well, I'm sure many know the rest.

-/-\\-

**_You have been reading:_ **

**_Worldfall, Chapter One: Discoveries_ **


	2. The Long Wait

**Tarpey I**

_Found in the small town of St. Johnsbury in Vermont, the subject of this interview lives a rather secluded life, writing sociology papers and the occasional science fiction awards-sweeper. For the sake of a degree of anonymity, they have requested that I use their birth name, rather than their famous pen name._

**Q: Thank you for agreeing to the interview. I understand that this is a rarity.**

A: As it should be. I was never very enamored with celebrity culture, especially before the war. Too toxic, too demanding. I only agreed to this because it's not about my books for once, and because it's you. I'm quite fond of your work on the rainforest standoff and the HESTIA project, so when I heard you were making an account of the war, I knew it'd be good.

**Q: Then I'll get to it. What social factors, do you believe, played into the role science fiction authors served in the wartime think tanks?**

A: I bet you gave me such a big question so I'd go on all sorts of tangents untangling it, huh? I like you already.

Anyway, I wouldn't call a lot of those think tanks 'wartime'. The vast majority were formed and disbanded before the war technically started. In fact, the first ones, including the first one I was in, started up as soon as the _Flishithy_ was discovered. Those were probably the widest ones, in terms of what sci fi authors participated. Almost entirely civilian, formed on their own by excited scientists, authors, or even just enthusiastic people. Most were barely above the level... hell, most of them _were_ just like your normal internet chat rooms and forums.

 _They_ _snort_.

Also about as well-moderated.

**Q: What think tank did you join at the time?**

A: It was just called the Special Circumstances Committee. Y'know, little nod to a sci-fi series just about all of us had read and adored growing up. It was largely writers of social science fiction. Focused more on how things like interstellar travel would change our lives and society as a whole, rather than on the specifications of technology that actually wouldn't work in real life. I was invited to join because the moderators liked a story I had written that year, which'd been nominated for a Hugo. Probably would've won if it wasn't for those fucking puppies.

Aaaaanyway, Special Circumstances was pretty laid-back. We talked about updates on the _Flishithy's_ position, reasons why they might've come, what kinda people might've been inside. A few thought it might have been a Von Neumann probe, that thing people said should've been everywhere if aliens existed. You know what I'm talking about, right? A probe that goes to a system, explores, then makes copies of itself and sends them to other stars so they can explore and duplicate? The argument got bigger when it started heading to Saturn, since that's a good place to go if you need a lot of resources to make duplicates.

A lot of us, myself included, thought it was a colony ship. The size was about right for a huge generation ark, big enough to hold a viable colony. I mean, we still argued incessantly about what was _inside_ , or where they were going to settle down. Some thought there was nothing but a few robots and the galaxy's biggest sperm bank inside, or maybe a million cryopods, or even that the crew had died long before and it was like the Flying Dutchman, carrying on its duty because the computer didn't know.

None of us seriously thought it was going to be a _warship_. Like, c'mon! We figured no one in their right minds would try to conquer a planet with a slow generation ark. It's just too big a gamble. The only thing that worried us back then was the ramscoop going into the sun.

**Q: Why?**

A: Well, one author, who was a _total fucking asshole_ that shouldn't have been there, kept on jabbering about how it was a sign they were intending to stay. Kept on comparing it to the Mayflower taking down its masts to help set up houses. I mean, that's factually incorrect since the Mayflower got taken apart in England, and he was only accidentally right if you ask me. Anyone settling, peacefully or not, needs to dump something like that. It's too big to lug around as dead weight. There were still so many possibilities, and an invasion was at the bottom.

...at least until it suddenly jumped to the top. Twice.

**Q: You mean with the Conquest Fleet, and later Cassini's images?**

A: Yep. As soon as saw the images, we almost unanimously agreed that it was an invasion fleet. We figured -and I still don't know how this wasn't the case- that anyone who can build photon rockets would be able to know of our civilization. Like, think about the fuel costs alone. It was, what, a few hundred billion tons of hydrogen? You don't make an investment that big unless the reward is even _bigger_. As in, securing a habitable world and untapped solar system big. Taking out a future competitor big.

Lemme tell you, not a good time to be anyone back then. Like this town has about as many people in it as some high school in California, and half the pent up sexual tension. I remember it being such a huge scandal in town when someone wanted a store to paint over a Chinese dragon they had on the side. Then we find out about the Conquest Fleet, and suddenly some guy literally blew up train tracks here in the hopes it'd "appease the lords". You couldn't get away from the panic.

And it wasn't like other panics, either. No other panic, no matter how bad the cause, had the same scope or the same _dread_. Why wouldn't it, either? I mean, this wasn't a normal disaster coming our way. This was fucking _existential_ , my guy. Not a vague, hard to imagine threat like global warming, or something that'd _only_ ruin us like nuclear war. We felt like a bug about to hit a windshield. The end of everyone and everything, from the Sistine Chapel to memes to our fucking memories. As far as we were thinking back then, honest to god Doomsday was coming.

If you ask me, that first month of panic was probably the real make or break for us. I'm not sure anyone who wasn't around or old enough back then can really understand how fragile basic social order was, how easily even the biggest nations could've just gone toppling down. After all, the governments and the agencies meant to enforce the peace -quiet, if you ask me- were also having the same mental breakdown. Honestly the anarcho-syndicalist part of me would've been really happy if there wasn't the threat of extinction by alien causing it.

We, and I mean _we_ , needed something to give us hope. Even if it was false hope in our eyes. We needed plans, we needed action.

**Q: Was that when you were recruited to the military think tank that came with War Plan Teal?**

A: Yep. I was sleeping next to the toilet when I got the call at 6am, coming right from the Pentagon. You should've seen my hungover panic- I thought they were coming to round me up as a thought criminal or something under a new defense law they slipped through Congress to "preemptively root out potential fifth columnists". Turns out they wanted to hire me, which was only less weird in my head. I mean, I'm an anarchist who'd once said that the current president needed to go to the Hague over the drone strikes, and here they were offering me a cushy 90k a year to throw shit at the wall and see what stuck.

Eh, at least they were nice enough to ask and use the carrot. If I recall correctly, China declared their think tank members special conscripts, so they were legally obligated to at least come to Zhongnanhai for vetting, lest they wanted a big ass fine. So I agreed, since something told me I was going to need the income. Sci fi's still climbing out of the mess the contact and war brought.

I was actually driven over to frickin' NORAD of all places, since they decided on having the think tank meet in person. I guess the worry at the time was that the aliens might've had some sort of hi-tech surveillance scanning our airwaves. I definitely hated having to wear pants to work, and to be honest I wasn't very comfortable there. Almost no one from my prior group was there.

**Q: Why was that?**

A: Because they wanted "useful" authors. People with actual backgrounds in appropriate fields. Engineers, physicists, computer tech, vets, and sociologists like me. And lemme tell you, old STEMlord sci fi writers tended to be colossal assholes, especially when they had to talk to "soft" scientists like me. There was this retired colonel who thought he was the hottest shit, because he had the "best of both worlds". He used to stare intently at me like he thought it'd be intimidating, probably because of his "special eyes". Hugely bigoted, tried to act like he was in charge. Everyone called him the "SPESS MAHREEN".

Man, you should've seen his face when he got booted and I got to stay. As it turned out, they needed sociologists more than they needed crusty old vets like him- any points he made were either being expanded upon by much smarter people, or they were so batshit insane -and obsessed with fanaticism- that no one took it seriously.

**Q: Did you have any major contributions to the think tank before the war?**

A: My biggest contribution was pretty early, and I made it with a few other sociologists, so actually I'm not very comfortable calling it "mine". Basically, we argued that the very nature of the fleet, while announcing hostility, also meant that this was probably more geared towards conquest than extermination. After all, if they just wanted to kill us, they could had one starship and had it not decelerate as it hit Earth. Maybe even scuttle so it'd create a cone of relativistic shrapnel and ensure impacts. That would be even worse than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, enough to ensure that we wouldn't survive.

A fleet meant that they likely wanted to either get rid of us while preserving the planet, or they wanted _us_. Maybe they wanted a client race, maybe they needed our intimate knowledge of Earth to help them ease into living on the planet. Either way, it meant that they couldn't just scour us from orbit. Even if they just wanted the planet, we're so inextricably imbedded into the ecology that anything capable of killing us off would ruin the Earth.

It wasn't _completely_ watertight. China's think tank actually argued against ours, stating that there could've been fundamental leaps in science and technology made by the aliens, which could ensure they could kill us off without ruining the biosphere. Their biggest series had something like that, and I wouldn't be surprised if the author had made the case.

Still, the government latched onto that and made sure to pump it into the media as much as they could.

**Q: Why?**

A: Because if the public's been told that the aliens can't exterminate us to get whatever they want, it inspires hope. Hope that maybe we can get through this, if we stick together and make ourselves too hard to get rid of. It also reminds the public that even a higher tech power is not invincible. Not us, and not these aliens, because even they have all these hard limits when dealing with us. They could be as far above us as we are above bugs, and they still might not win. Anyone who's seen a dumbass hit a hornet nest can attest to that.

Things started calming down after that. I mainly think it was due to War Plan Teal giving them something to focus on, but sometimes I'd like to think that I did my part.

-/-\\-

**Yeager I**

_Ret. General Jonathan Yeager greets me at his home in Upstate New York, and sits down with me at the porch. His wife, Karen, offers me a glass of sweet tea as she comes out and sits beside her husband._  
  
**Q: Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview, sir. I know this is far from your first.**  
  
A: Eh, what's one more? As long as it keeps future generations from forgetting the important things, I'm down for it.  
  
**Q: Alright then. Let's start with War Plan Teal. That was originally your idea, wasn't it?**  
  
A: Ideas aren't formed in a vacuum, kid. I made it with help from a few others, including some science fiction authors we invited over as part of a think tank. We spent the first three months after the Conquest Fleet's discovery working on the plan, refining it, seeing what could and couldn't work. We had to consider the capabilities of the invaders, their mentality, and what we could do to defend ourselves. Considering the amount of unknown variables, it wasn't easy.  
  
**Q: Could you go into detail?**  
  
A: Of course. First thing first, we had to throw out half the pre-existing defense plans for the US. Most of those involved invasions from other countries, or alliances of nations. Russia and China were the main ones, but we also have plans for invasions by a suddenly-hostile NATO, Mexico, and even Canada. I've had to read hundred-page documents on how we'd respond to an invasion by Russia with a new superweapon, or orbital platforms. Hell, I know how we'd handle a war with Iceland.  
  
Thing is, those are pretty well-known variables. We know what weapons Ivan's packing, and a good idea as to how he'd use it. We know the logistical capabilities of China, and the manpower they can field. Catch my drift?  
  
The document for alien invasion was six pages long, and started with 'Find God'.  
  
**Q: Did we think we were that seriously outmatched?**  
  
A: Well, the paper operated on the assumption that the aliens would have weapons that matched their other technological capabilities. After all, if a civilization can travel between stars within reasonable timespans, then they had a lot of material resources, and a lot of energy at their disposal. The amount of hydrogen fuel a single Race starship goes through when flying from Home to Earth is measured in tens of millions of tons. Do you seriously understand what kind of energy requirement that is? That's enough fusion fuel to power the pre-war world for thousands of years.  
  
The fithp were closer to the initial tech estimation, though thankfully their manpower was lacking, considering it was just the Flishithy. If it was an invading species with the fithp's tech and the Race's numbers...  
  
**Q: Did you have that in mind while drafting War Plan Teal?**  
  
A: Not as much as one might think. The plan was more than just a contingency against alien invasion; it was a way to calm down the populace, to give the impression that we had things under control. If we'd gone and said 'There's no way in hell we're gonna win', then there would've been full-blown anarchy. Already there'd been riots and looting all over the country. Death cults committing mass-suicide, people attempting to murder politicians in order to 'appease the alien overlords'... we needed to calm things down, and War Plan Teal was the key to that.

 **Q: What were the central tenets to the plan?**  
  
A: First, we decided to operate under the assumption that the aliens would use orbital bombardment against us. Not enough to plunge us into nuclear winter, but something that would cripple our infrastructure. That meant we had to deal with the possibility that all of our missile silos, bases, roads, and ships could be hit near-simultaneously, in a surgical strike. One of the authors actually developed such a system a while back, called Thor.  
  
So, how do you protect yourself against orbital bombardment? That was a question we had to answer in War Plan Teal.  
  
**Q: What did the plan dictate, then?**

A: First, we had to deal with the likelihood that our navy would be neutralized; they'd be sitting ducks out there. We scrapped plans to build the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers, and decommissioned a few of the older ships. We instead focused on producing more submarines. After all, what's a better shield from orbital detection than a mile of water?  
  
Still, we needed ships for transportation and force projection, so we kept those. If the enemy wasn't capable of hitting them, or we hit them hard enough to neutralize their orbital superiority, then we could roll them out at a moment's notice.  
  
It's part of the reason why we recommissioned the Iowa-class battleships. Despite their limited force projection when compared to carriers or destroyers, they were much more heavily armored than any modern ship, and their guns would be able to punch a hole in all but the most durable alien equipment we'd projected.  
  
We also made plans to shut down any and all bridges in the country, should the aliens bombard us. The highway overpasses we considered, but it would've been far too costly, especially considering what other preparations we needed to make.  
**  
Q: Which were?**

A: So many things, from the Ow Guns to the R&D, but I'll focus on what was my specialty- logistics. That's the lifeblood of any army, and without it even the mightiest war machine dies. With the Fleet coming our way, we were presented with logistical issues never seen before, as well as old problems exacerbated to unprecedented levels.

**Q: Such as?**

A: Well, lemme give an example of the new problems we were facing. Back in the Cold War, when it was my country against the Soviets, there was a lot of media dealing with Soviet invasions of the US. Movies, books, games... all of it fearmongering bullcrap. There was no way in hell the Soviets could have ever invaded us. Sure, they had the largest land army on Earth, with expert mechanization, tech pretty close to ours in most areas, and lots of experience from the Nazi invasion, but they never seriously considered putting boots on American soil, and that's because of logistics.

You'd have to cross thousands of miles, by land or by sea, just to get here from the USSR. The costs in fuel alone to get an army large enough to invade the US _to_ the US would be horrific, and then you have to maintain that thousand-mile supply chain in the middle of what would easily be the biggest war in history. If that chain broke anywhere, anywhen, you'd be FUBAR. The same went for us as well, even though we easily had the best logistics of any nation.

**Q: But the Race and Fithp wouldn't have to worry about supply chains, at least in that regard.**

_Yeager claps his hands._

A: Bingo! My country would've been hard-pressed to get twenty million men across twelve thousand klicks with a safe supply chain. The Lizards alone managed to carry three times that number across twelve goddamn light-years. All the other obstacles to invasions- oceans, mountains, coastal defenses, everything... they meant nothing. What's a mountain range or the Pacific to an honest to god starship? With that kind of transport, they could land anywhere they wanted, bypassing defenses that would chew up any earthly army, and deposit troops before you could respond.

Part of War Plan Teal was to deal with the orbitals problem, but the other part, my part, was how to handle our own logistics. How to prepare the world for war, in both the conventional ways and the unconventional ways. We needed to look at our advantages- time, and industry.

**Q: What do you mean by conventional ways and unconventional ways?**

A: I'm talking about the difference between getting a country ready for a war with another country, and fortifying the entire planet against an outside invader. It means new advantages along with the disadvantages I mentioned earlier, and it means different assumptions about supply chains and the like.

Time was obvious. No country has ever been able to prepare for a war unmolested in one way or another. There'd be sanctions, or embargoes, or outright attacks, even if the war hadn't started yet. The US was left without most of its rubber while gearing up its industries pre-WWII because the Japanese withheld on that, and so had to develop synthetics.

Here, however? We had six years to get ready however we wanted, because the Race and the Fithp couldn't do anything until they actually arrived. We didn't have to worry about submarines sinking our cargo ships as they zipped supplies across the ocean, or the Lizards encouraging suppliers to sanction. Every country was in on it- even if they couldn't or wouldn't _help_ , they'd do nothing to hamper either. If our allies in Europe wanted special anti-orbital weaponry, we could bring it over without a problem. If the Russians needed to use the Black Sea to bring in computers, even the Ukrainians would allow some wiggle room.

Six years of uninterrupted preparations is a _long time,_ especially if you're on an emergency total-war footing. Even with the Nazis killing millions of their people and entire cities destroyed, the Soviets managed to build tens of thousands of tanks within four years. Now imagine what more advanced and populous nations could accomplish with more time and fewer hampers.

And that ties into the second major advantage of industry.

**Q: You've discussed a great deal about that already. Was there anything else different about it compared to terrestrial conflicts?**

A: In all the ways that count. For one thing, we had the ultimate home field advantage. The Race and the Fithp only had what they brought, and we knew that from the start. Their supply chain was light-years distant, meaning that reinforcements or resupply were impossible. Even assuming they had bullshit replicating tech like from Star Trek, they could only bring so much of that, and it'd take significant exponential growth to rival our own industry. Meanwhile, we were _living_ on our industry. Everything on Earth, from the factories to the crops to the air we breathed was our supply chain.

If we needed more troops, we could open up recruiting pools. If we needed more material, we could build it in our own backyard. If we needed more factories to make the material, we could build them.

Not to mention that this time, our industries had cooperation never before seen. It was no longer one nation or a group of nations against another, but every nation working together in one way or another. It meant us pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Russians pulling out of Crimea, and China and India shutting up about Kashmir. Sanctions we had on each other were lifted, and tight-knit trade agreements were made. Groups that had hated each other's guts- hell, _still hated_ each other's guts, were now palling up, because they knew the alternative was worse. That kind of global synergy was never heard of before.

_He shakes his head in disbelief._

You know it's serious when goddamn Pakistan and India were sharing designs with each other. Israel even went back to the '48 borders to secure a proper mutual defense pact with Palestine, though I imagine the Arab guns going in also played a part.

So yeah, those were the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of prep. War Plan Teal laid 'em out, and talked about how to exploit the former and fight the latter.

**Q: What sort of logistics preparations were made during that time, stateside and elsewhere?**

A: Well, aside from everyone pulling their fingers out of each other's asses so they could help each other pass the ammunition? The first big thing I talked about was industry overhaul. Optimizing the means of production in ways that'd help us fight back. That meant ripping apart "frivolous" industries like cosmetics and toys and the like, so their parts could be given to the war effort. It meant redirecting the youth who'd been studying to work in those industries to apply their skills and education in other ways. Engineers, analysts, the like.

There was also the huge reforms we needed in things like food production. Pre-war, the world at large only had enough grain reserves for two months. For all we knew, we might've been facing years of famine, because of one reason or another, and so we needed to ensure we could feed the populace. Every country implemented something like that, encouraging or enforcing the agriculture industry to grow efficiently.

Food wasn't the only thing we needed to preserve. We needed petroleum, and lots of it. Did you know that tanks using the M1 chassis had fuel efficiencies measured in gallons per mile, instead of the other way around? If the aliens knew of our dependency, it'd be too easy for them to cut us off from the oil, and so we needed to preserve what we had in addition to extracting the resources. That meant finally cranking out the gas ration cards we'd made during the crisis of '73, while China expanded and intensified the license plate lotteries, where you could only drive that day if your license plate began with the selected number. India actually made every other day in major cities car-free days.

A lot of these preparations also had the benefit of helping combat the damage we'd been doing to the environment. And that ties into what I was talking about with _unconventional_ fortification, because when it's a war of Earth vs an outside foe, the biosphere itself is an asset... and a potential target. We had no idea if the Lizards or Fithp were going to engage in some manner of strategic hostile terraforming, making our own planet less pleasant to us while improving their own performance, or if they might just damage the ecology deliberately to hurt us. When faced with that possibility, healing nature has wartime strategic importance.

 **Q: What were reactions to the plan when it was unveiled?**  
  
A: Mixed. Some called it 'hyper-aggressive' and 'paranoid', saying that we _technically_ still didn't know if the aliens were coming with hostile intent. They criticized the idea of putting the US in total war economy, since that meant giving up a lot of creature comforts, and even those who agreed on the idea of a defense plan said that it wasn't a good plan, that it was too defeatist.  
  
**Q: Why was it considered defeatist, or a bad plan altogether?**  
  
A: Well, they felt we were focusing too much on the likelihood of getting our asses kicked. We called for only defending the most important parts of the country. We knew it'd be impractical to defend the whole US; it's too damn big. Why waste lives and equipment fighting for some sparsely populated bit of Kansas, when you could better use it defending the missile silos or major population centers?  
  
We also made many evacuation plans, dealing with what would happen if New York was gone, or if the enemy captured Washington. We also had to contend with the possibility of losing all our satellites and other methods of modern communication. We had plans for using carrier pigeons and honest-to-god telegraphs, since it'd be hard to disrupt that, when compared to satellite or radio towers. Can't use an EMP on a dove, after all.  
  
I must commend the President for selling the plan to the people. I know a lot of people didn't like him at the time, but he was an intelligent man, and he knew that the plan was our best hope.  
  
When other countries praised the plan and started adapting it to their own defense policies, people started quieting down. Of course, we made some changes. People liked the idea of Ow Guns, so we got a higher budget for making them, and we also diverted some money to EMP hardening of civilian hardware. I still disagree with the cyber-warfare countermeasures we made; the odds of aliens hacking into the Pentagon was absurd, even if they were high-tech.  
  
Still, I knew the plan wasn't a solve-all.  
  
**Q: Care to explain?**  
  
A: Whoever controls the orbitals, controls the war. That much was clear from the get-go. Even with the proposed Ow Guns, the enemy would still have a firm grasp on the ultimate high-ground. And the reports about the ship near Saturn had me _very_ concerned, if what some of the writers and scientists said meant anything. 

Unless we could get control of orbit, I felt, there was no way of winning the war.  
  
But how would you get weapons into orbit? I knew we wouldn't be able to repeal the treaties against putting weapons in orbit, especially nuclear ones. Good luck trying to convince Russia to let us put nukes in orbit.  
  
So, that was when we decided to propose Project: Archangel. We knew it would be the key to victory.  
  
If we stood a chance, that is. All we could do was get ready, and endure that long wait to armageddon.

-/-\\-

**Hundessa I**

_The small farm by the Dechatu River is one where anachronisms prove as abundant as the potatoes it grows. A repurposed Race prefab adorned by local graffiti sits in the center, where the subject of my interview spends his days when not working the farm. An octogenarian Oromo man, Zerezghi Hundessa stoops over noticeably as he sits on his doorstep, a worn krar by his feet. Patting the stoop, he has me sit next to me as we begin the interview._

**Q: Good afternoon to you, Ato.**

A: Enh? Am I under arrest, young'un? I swear, officer, I thought it was just some tumeric!

_He cackles._

You don't have to call me that; just call me Zerezghi.

**Q: Then a good afternoon to you, Zerezghi.**

A: Much better, young'un. Now what's it you want to ask me? I can't say I have any special stories about the house, unless kids these days have low standards.

**Q: I actually wanted to first ask about how the pre-war preparations impacted agriculture, especially in regions where cattle and cash crops were dominant.**

A: Looks like the kids these days do have low standards. Well, I guess I should start where I was at the beginning, since I can actually talk about that. Lemme think...

_He picks up his krar and absentmindedly drums his fingers along it._

Back then, I had the same land as I do now, more or less. Probably more. Yeah, it was actually a fair bit bigger, but work didn't feel as rough back then because I was a spry sixty instead of the old fart you see now. I was a cowherd, and so were lots of folks around here, and all over the country. I had... five heads of Arado? Naw, it was six; Red Butt just had a calf. Alright cows, those Arado. Not as nice as Horro, but they were good oxen. I'd sell them to the neighbors growing cereals, and I'd sell milk at the local market.

It wasn't the best work. Didn't make a lot of money out of it, since Arado didn't make a lot of milk, but they did eat a lot of grass. Most of the money I made went into maintaining the pasture, or paying the young neighbor's boy who helped me out. He didn't get much, but it did mean he could have lunch with my granddaughter.

**Q: What was the homestead like pre-war?**

A: Much more crowded. The house was smaller than this here thing, including the stable where the cows would sleep during the night. Me and my wife would sleep in the stable next to the cows, since they were nice and warm during the cold nights, while my son and his children slept in the house, on the thatch floor. My son worked at a school, but the money didn't help here much because my grandson needed medicine, and that ate money like Red Butt would eat grass.

Still, it was a nice city compared to other parts, since the people who could read were a bit more numerous than normal. The real benefit of that job was making sure the kids knew how to read, which meant maybe they could also get work in the city. Lots of people in the country couldn't read back then, 'specially if you were poor country bumpkin like me, or a lady. Neither me or my daughter knew how to read.

Things were picking up a bit, though. My boy was teaching me to read a little, his boy was doing better, and my granddaughter and the neighbor boy were getting close.

Then the lizards and elephants showed up, and that went bad pretty quick.

**Q: How early would you say the discourse over agriculture reform reached here?**

A: Hell if I know! My son was the only one who paid attention to the news, and he never read a lot about what other places were doing to get ready. He told me the Americans and other big countries were talking with each other, but I didn't think about that too much. I figured the aliens might just leave a cowherd in the middle of nowhere alone, and if they were going to kill me, I couldn't do anything about it, so why worry?

All I knew was that about three months after the big news hit, we got visited by a man from the government who told us we had to give up the cows.

**Q: Why?**

A: He told us something about that war plan the big countries came up with, about how we needed to make reserves in case the aliens destroyed our farms. The reedy-looking fellow had to read from a card as he explained that cows took too much water, too much land, and didn't give enough food to be worth it. And that if we wanted to win, we had to be ready to make sacrifices like that.

I asked him what I was supposed to do without my cows. He told me to grow one of the approved crops, like potatoes. I told him I didn't know how to farm potatoes. He told me I'd have to learn. I told him where he could stick the card, and left it at that.

**Q: What happened afterwards?**

A: My son started arguing with me, saying that we shouldn't make trouble. He told me about the crackdowns that happened in other places, and that they might just take the cows anyway. The reedy-looking government man was just standing there, watching us.

_He sighs._

The boy won. I blame his eyes. They reminded me too much of my wife, and she would always get me to change my mind. So I told the government man that if I had to get rid of the cows, I'd do it myself. He agreed, telling me that we were encouraged to sell the meat at the market and use the money to switch to crops.

So, by the next day I marched Red Butt and the others to the market, and put 'em all down. Damn shame, and it didn't even get me much money.

**Q: Was it because of competition?**

A: Smart young'un. All the other cowherds were doing the same at the markets, and people were going crazy over the sudden flood of beef. I must've made only a tenth of what I could've gotten normally. There must've been only two or three oxen left in the entire town after that day was done1. I didn't even have enough to buy good tools, so I decided just to give the money to my son. I figured that they should get out while they can, maybe go to somewhere they could be safe when the aliens came. So they did, leaving just me and the worst potato farm in the world.

Didn't even have potatoes.

**Q: How did that change?**

A: Well, the evening they left, the boy came over. I didn't know why, since I didn't have cows to take care of anymore, and my granddaughter left with my son. But that boy...

_He tears up, then wipes his eye._

That beautiful boy came over with a good hoe and some potatoes, right from his family farm. He told me that he had five brothers to help his folks on the farm, but since I didn't have anyone to help me, he'd do it. He told me he'd help teach me to grow 'em, and we'd take care of 'em together. I asked him why he'd do that for an old man.

He said, "Because it's what a good neighbor does."

_He chuckles._

And then he said, "And when Feiven finds out I helped her grandpa, she'll be really impressed."

1 While an exaggeration, stastistics show that as much as 95% of Earth's cattle were slaughtered within six months of the Discovery, leading to the chaotic months of scarcity and inflation known in the English-speaking world as "Dairy December" and "Jerky January".

-/-\\-

**Machado I**

_I_ _t is a quiet day on the Amazon, save for the gentle paddling of the canoe I find myself sitting in. Across from me is Victoria Machado, world-renowned wildlife biologist and author of **Seeds of Hope: Ecological Restoration after World War Three**. She is an older woman, with silver hair pulled into a tight ponytail, and deep wrinkles cross her tanned face. Still, she proves a very energetic talker, gesticulating wildly as we move down the river, fithp interns providing the rowing._  
  
**Q: It is a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Machado.**  
  
A: The pleasure's all mine. I greatly enjoyed your piece on the Great Barrier Reef Protection Act, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to have this interview. It's important that people understand what we do, and why we do it. Far too many people take what we have for granted, without knowing about the work we put in.  
  
**Q: Now then, let's begin at the very start. When did ecological preservation enter discourse in the build up to the war?**  
  
A: Very soon, actually. I'd say it was about six months after the discovery of the fleets that I received the special commission, and I was just a junior biologist at the time who'd only graduated from UFRJ a year before. Back then, I was primarily tagging caimans and collecting data on ratios of male to female hatchings for green anacondas, working out of a very small research station that didn't even have proper plumbing. And then suddenly... I and thousands of others were thrust into a race against time.  
  
**Q: As in, before the invasion arrived. Would you care to explain what exactly the race was for?**  
  
A: It was a race to... well, I guess you could say it was a race to fortify the planet. Not the countries and people living on it- there were plenty of other groups handling _that_. My country crimped a lot from the American Plan. Two of my brothers got drafted, and my father got a factory job making tanks.

But that's a digression, my bad. Where was I? Ah, yeah. I'm not talking about building literal forts for us, but fortifying the _planet_. Not getting humanity ready for the invasion, but getting _Earth_ ready. After all, it was facing a shock it had never quite experienced before, and we had no idea if it could survive that one.

**Q: Weren't there more drastic impacts to the biosphere in prehistoric times? Some of them literal.**

A: Well, those drastic impacts led to mass extinctions. Those aren't exactly good things.

_She laughs, then slowly frowns._

Life... the ecology is an odd thing. It's simultaneously incredibly rigid, and deceptively fragile. Life on Earth can continue after the entire planet freezes over, or after a colossal asteroid impact, and then something as seemingly small as increasing acidity in the oceans can trigger mass extinctions. We were seeing that in action before the war, thanks to our own stupid abuses of the environment. Just three hours' walking from my research station there were massive logging operations tearing up the forest, which if you ask me is about as short-sighted as selling your organs for drugs.

An alien invasion brings entirely new factors in when it comes to environmental issues, stressors never encountered before. We could've been facing use of weaponry that would pollute the Earth with chemical compounds and radioactive elements that literally never appeared before on this planet, just like what our own nuclear weapons introduced. Outside of some trace amounts on the outer edges of uranium, all plutonium on Earth is man-made, did you know that? And that started back in the forties, a time when we couldn't even leave the atmosphere. Who knew what kind of horrifying pollutants could be produced by a starfaring people?

That's not getting into other unique stressors they could bring, like _deliberate_ targeting of our biosphere. That could take so many forms, as far as what both experts and crazies said. It could've been simple things, like bombing out forests or starting massive wildfires in grasslands, or it could've involved scouring radiation from those photon rockets, which is something life on Earth never had to deal with, even in the most chaotic natural disasters. And that's not even counting the crazier ideas, like bioweapons that affect everything with our nucleotides, or hostile terraforming producing conditions that our kind of life couldn't endure. 

That ties into yet another unique problem no other ecological crisis had- _truly_ invasive species. Invasive species have wreaked havoc on us for as long as remember, from rabbits in Australia to triffid plant in West Africa, and those are still Earth life. What kind of problems could invasive species from an entirely different origin point cause? Something as simple as alien _poop_ could lead to ecological devastation.

Even if they didn't have unique pollutants, and they somehow didn't introduce invasive species, we were still facing potential ecological devastation never seen before. For all we knew, they could turn the Serengeti to glass, or perhaps this very rainforest would be nuked in an attempt to drive them off the planet. We are completely dependent on this biosphere for survival- it provides us our food, our water, the air we breathe. If deliberately targeted, it could cost us the war, and our very existence.

And that's what I mean by fortifying Earth. In a war of us versus a force completely outside of our world, nature itself is a strategic war asset, and it was an asset we had been destroying. The leaders of the world realized that quickly enough.

**Q: I was under the impression that conservationism was a controversial topic pre-war.**

_She snorts._

The governments _knew_ the importance of ecosystems, even during the pre-war ecological crises we were making. They usually just didn't _care_ , because the consequences would be long after they died, and the money they got from companies was very much in the now. But now, they were looking at devastation that'd be in their lifetime, and now _suddenly_ they wanted to go green. Fucking self-centered pricks, all of them, but even pricks have survival instincts. They realized that healing the environment and preserving samples could be the difference between "it took us fifty years to recover the economy" and "we'll never leave the New Stone Age".

To make that difference, we needed to gather seeds and sperm and eggs and all other sorts of genetic material. Not just from crop plants and pasture animals, but from wild species that we might need to reintroduce into the wild. And not only did we need to gather this genetic material, but we needed to understand the ecology as much as possible, to ensure we could restore it to the best of our abilities.  
  
Problem was, our biosphere is big. Like, _really_ big. Do you know how many animal species we knew about back then?  
  
**Q: Er... a hundred thousand?**  
  
A: One and a half million, which we knew even back then was far from all of them. We may have been wiping out quite a few each year, but that still left potentially millions more we needed to discover. That wasn't counting plant life, either. It was a daunting challenge, and I still remember how hopeless it felt when I first got the commission. I thought to myself, "If we end up needing this, it won't be enough." That was good ol' Long Wait doom showing itself.  
  
Thankfully, we still had six years to do it. And with all the money flooding into wartime preparations, there was plenty to spare for ensuring we had a functioning biosphere if we won. It was honestly amazing how much money could be spared for protecting the planet if we weren't spending it on making sex dolls and novelty keychains. There was money pouring in from civilian government programs, various militaries, philanthropists... I think the budget for the first year alone was in the neighborhood of a hundred billion dollars...  
  
**Q: What did you do in particular during that time?**  
  
A: I was hired by the UN special commission. Most of my time was spent here, in the Amazon, though with dozens of other wildlife experts. It made me feel a bit useless, when you had giants of the field setting up shop next to my crappy station. I got a spiffy UN uniform out of it, but I still felt like a kid dressing up when people whose papers I had to read for my thesis were giving me commands.

We were like... ever play Pokemon? I felt like a Pokemon character, you know? Gotta catch em all. We were collecting eggs, seed pods, sperm, spores, and any other useful piece of genetic material that could be used for conservation. I was in charge of herps, as that was my specialty. I actually found six new species of tree frog and four species of Dactyloidae... I mean, anoles.  
  
Everything we found was examined six ways to Sunday, cataloged, and sent off. Gene banks were cropping up all over the planet, made specifically for post-war conservation. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was expanded, and a few clones of it were sprinkled about the Arctic and Antarctic. Research labs began dedicating more money to figuring out a way of cloning organisms without need for a female, in case no specimens were left.

**Q: Would you say that these programs had a significant impact on pre-war ecological issues?**

A: Oh yeah! That was what honestly helped me out of the gloom the Long Wait put over me like a heavy blanket. All around us, as the years went on, nature was visibly healing. The logging at the Amazon stopped overnight, and all the pastures that'd been eating away at the forest began to disappear, being converted to farms or just getting plain abandoned. I remember social media having a field day when animals we thought extinct in the wild started showing back up, and some people started doing artsy photos of the abandoned machinery and stuff being reclaimed by nature.

I know some organizations decided to capitalize on that, starting huge campaigns to plant trees in areas that'd been deforested. There was plenty of territory to do it in, too- I think the amount of land reclaimed by nature was almost the size of Africa, which _is_ an odd unit of measurement. Definitely billions of acres of land returned to the forests and savannahs. For the first time in God knows how many years, the majority of animal life on Earth wasn't cattle. Hell, the air _tasted_ better.  
  
It was honestly astonishing, how much we did during that time. Still, there was a sense of deep worry. Worry that we would actually need to use all of these gene banks, worry that the aliens would destroy them or pervert them into something worse... and worry that what we did was not enough.

And God Himself knows, that we were in for a long wait.

-/-\\-

**Audio Transcription - Convening of the Shiplords, December 2nd, 2014**

**[Fleetlord Atvar]:** Gathered Shiplords of the Third Conquest Fleet, as ordained by the 127th Emperor Hetto, after whom this bannership was gracefully named, in Year 101,9821, and sent forth by the 42nd Emperor Risson in Year 103,5372, I have called for this convening of the Shiplords a full twelve years early, unconventional as it may be, for we face unconventional obstacles.

 **[Shiplord Horrep]:** Exalted Fleetlord, Chosen of the Emperor, what is it that you mean by "unconventional obstacles"?

 **[Shiplord Straha]:** Unconventional is the proper term for it. We are still years away from Tosev Three! What matter could it be?

 **[Shiplord Tpanak]:** Fleetlord Atvar, is calling a meeting at this time wise? The consumption of power and resources underway at this moment due to our premature awakening means that we may be forced to cut our observation time short.

 **[Fleetlord Atvar]:** The matter at hand is far graver than pre-emptive use of life support and rations, gathered Shiplords. It is one that may throw the course we follow to victory into unknown territory. To hear it from past my jaws is insufficient, and so I will forward to you the same data I was faced with.

_A few minutes pass in silence between the Fleetlord and his subordinates, though some Shiplords begin in heated communication with each other on private channels._

**[Shiplord Hattiz]:** By the Emperor. Exalted Fleetlord, is this data correct?

 **[Fleetlord Atvar]:** Yes. Those tiny doppler-shifts indicate that the only source of these radio waves can be Tosev Three. They were inadvertently detected by our own radio systems. Though I am unwilling to lunge at wild conclusions, the data plainly shows that these radio waves fall outside of any known natural source, and were not detected by the probe survey that visited the system all those centuries back. They are clearly artificial in nature.

 **[Shiplord Psinil]:** Exalted Fleetlord, how can this be? Tosev Three's native sentient species is pre-industrial, lacking even the ability to produce gunpowder weaponry. Sixteen hundred years is far too short a time for such advancement. Could these be emanated by our probes? Perhaps they did not deorbit as predicted and have malfunctioned, producing these?

 **[Shiplord Kirel]:** Doubtful. Though orbits of that stability are possible, telemetric data from the expedition indicated that the orbits of the probes were too eccentric to last even a tenth of that time. And even if they managed to stay in orbit, the RTGs3 serving as auxiliary power sources only have life expectancies of two hundred years.

 **[Shiplord Ttish]:** Then perhaps the Tosevites found some radios from probes that failed to properly self-destruct, and have figured out crude methods of maintaining them as a form of, ssa, object-worship? They may see them as otherworldly gifts.

 **[Fleetlord Atvar]:** No. These signals do not match any codes used by our deep-space equipment, and are of too great a density. However unlikely it may seem, it appears that the inhabitants of Tosev Three have managed... an unusually swift technological development.

 **[Shiplord Straha]:** An unusually swift technological development, o Exalted Fleetlord? That is what you wish to call it? That's not _development_. That is an explosion! They've managed to industrialize in an impossibly short time!

 **[Fleetlord Atvar]:** Check your tone, Shiplord. This is not a call to panic.

 **[Shiplord Straha]:** Then how should we go about this? They have radio, and therefore it is possible they possess other technologies that can only come with industrialization, up to explosive metal bombs themselves! Such development in such a time frame implies that the Tosevites accomplished radical advancements within individual lifetimes. Who knows what developments they could make in response to us? Perhaps they have already detected us, and shall greet our landings with their own great armies! I say that such a species is too dangerous to leave alive.

 **[Fleetlord Atvar]:** Silence, Shiplord. Such baseless speculation only accomplishes a diminishment of our morale. There is much we do not yet know about the Tosevite situation. It is entirely possible that this explosion was an anomaly, and their development has once again slowed to a more natural pace. Millennia passed between our invention of radio and our development of the explosive metal bomb, and so to assume that the presence of one on Tosev Three precludes the other is foolish. I shall not make a radioactive graveyard out of such a prized world and deny it to the Race because of such idiocy.

 **[Shiplord Kirel]:** Then what are we to do, Exalted Fleetlord?

 **[Fleetlord Atvar]:** We shall do what we were sent across the stars to accomplish at the behest of our Emperor. We are not terrified hatchlings, gathered Shiplords. We are esteemed soldiers of the Race, greatest in the cosmos! We will do what it takes to conquer the Tosevites and bring them into the fold of the true culture under the Emperor. To do that, I shall instruct our top-ranked scientists to research into the issue, operating in half-year shifts, with scientists from twenty ships operating each shift. Each year, we shall reconvene and overlook the data procured, so we are able to revise our plan of conquest.

We have received a great shock today, gathered Shiplords, and I doubt it will be our last. But the Race has faced obstacle after obstacle and has conquered them all, crossing the stars themselves to do so. Tosev Three will merely be another such obstacle, and like all others it will fall. With that I dismiss this convening.

1 Approximately winter of 1220 CE.

2 Approximately spring of 1998 CE.

3 RTG stands for radioisotopic thermoelectrical generator, a type of battery that uses radioactive materials to provide low levels of power for decades on end. RTGs are primarily used for unmanned spacecraft of human, Race, and fithp make, when conditions make solar power untenable.

-/-\\-

**Pāk I**

_A natural seaman, my current interview subject insists that we go out in his personal hydrofoil, the Thai coastline diminishing in the distance until only water surrounds us. Powering off, he pulls out of the cooler a bottle of some unlabeled sweet drink and hands it to me, before procuring his own bottle and sipping from it._

**Q: Thank you for the drink, Khun Sornram-**

A: Please, only my superiors called me Sornram. Call me Pāk, like everyone else does.

**Q: Doesn't that mean 'mouth'?**

A: Yeah. That's because I have a big-ass mouth, enough it made my dad use those words when he first saw me in my mother's arms. I once managed to stuff five raw eggs without cracking them for a bet while I was in basic. But you aren't here for the wondrous exploits of my fat mouth, now are you?

**Q: No, I didn't. I'm here to ask about the trafficking situation here, pre-war and during.**

_He frowns._

A: I don't pretend I was being a good samaritan back then. I wasn't in the business out of the goodness of my heart- the money was good, and I could be my own boss, sailing the seas with the salty wind in my hair. The only thing I can say was that I wasn't a monster to them. I saw them as customers in desperate need of a commodity I could offer, not the commodity itself, unlike so many others in the business.

**Q: How large was the human trafficking business here in pre-war Thailand?**

A: Huge. My country was basically a pitstop for all the lanes of traffic, from China to Indonesia to Japan to anywhere touched by the Pacific. You had people who wanted to get in, and people who wanted to get out. About a million of my countrymen were overseas working before the war, according to something I read in the newspaper, but I'd bet my left testicle only a tenth of them were actually documented. So many of them, and so many of the foreigners brought into the country, were not in for good work. You had kids from Myanmar working on fishing boats, making less money in a day than this...

_He looks at the drink in his hand._

I honestly don't know what this is. The writing's in that scrawl the elephants use. But anyway, they wouldn't be able to buy this shit with a day's wages, even assuming they were paid. And that's not getting into the girls- not women, _girls_ , who had to engage in sex work.

I didn't do that sort of business. My business was immigration, specifically Rohingya.

**Q: A Muslim minority group in Myanmar.**

A: Yeah, and when you hear "Muslim minority", it's suddenly no wonder they're leaving their homeland. The government in Myanmar was never friendly to them, stretching back decades. They couldn't travel, couldn't get education, couldn't get citizenship. Hundreds of thousands of them were refugees in their own fucking country. Who wouldn't want to leave that kind of shithole? They'd pack into rafts and hug the coast as they came to my country, risking starvation and dehydration just to get to somewhere safer.

That's where I came in. I worked in a harbor in the west of my country, near a place that refugee rafts containing them often would stop. Sometimes they'd try to find places in my country, which... let's just say all too often the navy would just push them back to sea. I'm more ashamed of serving on a boat like that than I am doing what I did on my own.

I'd roll up in my fishing schooner and show up where the cops and navy find the rafts, which I knew about because I had some old friends left in the force who loved accepting gifts. Then I'd offer to take them to Penang in Malaysia, after they show me what they'd had. I never used a flat rate- I'd just see what they could offer and go from there. Then I'd cram them in the schooner under some tarps, and race to Penang. Sometimes I'd have them help me pull some fish I could sell if they didn't have that much to offer.

**Q: What if they didn't have enough?**

A: Then I'd just go find another. They'd be mighty upset, but as far as I cared, it wasn't my problem. I remember seeing a fistfight break out on one boat when a man offered to have his daughter suck my dick to make up for the exchange, which wasn't very popular with her or a few others. I just left that mess alone. Even if I was the kind of bastard to do that, I like my women so fat I can hide my hand in her rolls. And believe me, I literally saw a fucking alien in the flesh before I saw a fat Rohingya.

**Q: How did the Discovery impact your, er, business?**

A: Well, I didn't see the immediate changes because I took the time off to get absolutely shitfaced with some of my friends. But by the time I got back into the groove, there _was_ no more groove. First thing first, there were a _lot_ more people coming in on rafts. Not dozens, or hundred, but _thousands_. So many boats stuffed to the brim with scared and scrawny Rohingya that it fucked with shipping.

You'd think that'd be good for business, but it wasn't. If you stopped to talk with one, the others would start swarming, and sometimes they'd get impatient. It attracted too much attention, the kind that the normal bribes wouldn't cover. And it wasn't just Rohingya anymore, either. It was the, uh, I guess I can say normal Burmese? The citizens, you know? Buddhists packed in with the Muslims they'd been harassing. That was when I knew things were getting serious, you know? When the threat of the fleet became tangible instead of just some picture of lights.

I remember asking one boat what the fuck was happening. I thought it was because Burma was falling apart, which it definitely was at the time. I think there were uprisings and clashes all across the country, from people who thought the military junta wouldn't cut it to fight the invasion, who thought there needed to be a stricter junta, and all that shit.

But they didn't give that as the reason they were leaving. Know what they told me?

**Q: What?**

A: "It'll be safer from _them_."

That was like a cold splash of water to the face. It made me think. These people were no longer just fleeing genocide or the unrest. They were fleeing because we were _all_ at war, not with each other, but with a kind of foe that we had never dealt with before. Every country was going to be a target. _Nowhere_ would be completely safe, because there was no neutral ground to go to.

Can you imagine living in a small country, or living in a country going through the shit, and knowing in a few years you'd be invaded by some army from a distant star, wielding weapons that could potentially exceed ours in every way? You really think you could trust your country's military to protect you, especially if they already hated your guts? It was a kind of vulnerability most people had never fully sensed before.

Lemme ask you- where would you rather be when the aliens came? In some tiny country with an army small enough to fit in a school gym, or in a stable country with nukes and millions of soldiers armed to the teeth?

The answer was clear to those people.

**Q: Did that impact where you'd take them?**

A: No shit. Fuck Malaysia, they were probably thinking. Thailand was one of the best-armed countries on the planet, at least as far as smaller ones went. We didn't hold a candle to the United States or China, but we were pretty good in the eyes of people from "developing" nations. Same went for Indonesia and Vietnam. India definitely accepted the brunt, though I only know that from some reports made by both the news and old colleagues.

When I did take people on my boat, I'd end up taking them to Banda Aceh, a city in Sumatra. I couldn't do as many trips because of what I was saying earlier, and something later on, but at least they had more money to offer since it wasn't just Rohingya anymore.

**Q: What do you mean by "something later on"?**

A: Well, one day when I went to pick up some refugees, there was a standoff between a Thai destroyer and a Burmese patrol boat, with refugee rafts between them. Almost turned bloody. I knew there was no way in hell I was going to jump into that. Then the problem became that the standoffs became more frequent, making it harder and harder.

I eventually found out that the Burmese wanted the refugees _back_. That threw me for a loop, you know? They had hated these people, kicked them, spat on them, raped them... they hadn't given a shit when they left, and probably cheered that the scum was leaving. But now? Now was a different story. Because the higher-ups knew the logic of the refugees, and they _needed_ them.

Why? Because now they needed soldiers, and factory workers, and all these other things vital to preparing for the apocalyptic war coming our way. And suddenly, all those Rohingya you were kicking out become useful for something. Other countries had the same realization, because at that point the issue was getting _bad_. It was a vicious cycle, you know? The people felt their country was not going to be ready for the shitstorm, so they started leaving, and that in turn made the country even less ready, and so even _more_ people were leaving.

That was the case all over the world. You had people in the Caucasus running to Russia, you had people from the smaller and more fucked up countries in Africa fleeing to places like Egypt and Nigeria, and people from all over fleeing to Europe and India and China and the United States. I can only imagine what kind of chaos was going on at the border between Mexico and America. It seemed like entire countries were going to be abandoned by the time the aliens arrived1.

I remember reading into it, because I needed to know how it'd affect the business, and because of genuine curiosity. Myanmar kinda reminded me of an abusive ex trying to get his girlfriend back. "No, no, we didn't mean those things! We love you, Rohingya. See, see, we're gonna give you citizenship! We'll give you good jobs in the military if you come back, okay? Just come back and save your country from the aliens, please?"

And of course the Rohingya and the other marginalized in other countries didn't fucking bite. Their logic was probably like "Yeah, well you probably won't exist in six years, so fuck off."

When that don't work, that's when it gets coercive. Hence the standoffs. Myanmar was furious that my country and others were either accepting refugees or getting rich off of sending them on their way. Some countries told them to stuff it, since those same refugees could be used to bolster _their_ defenses. Others were getting antsy.

**Q: How did they resolve it?**

A: They didn't.

_He sips his drink._

Oh, they tried. They made mutual defense pacts, gave each other guns and ammo and food, did joint training exercises... but the people still kept on coming. It led to informal trade offs, I suppose. You know, giving them guns to "make up" for the depletion in manpower, that sort of thing. Some countries tried to crack down, but it looked ugly in the news, and there was talk of how some of the bigger countries might try to "stabilize" regions to ensure there wouldn't be easy beachheads for alien landings, so it didn't solve the problem.

It _did_ get me out of the business, however. My country cracked down on the trafficking to try and appease the wider world, though they still accepted refugees for the manpower. Got me "caught" by a navy patrol, and then they made me an offer I couldn't exactly refuse. I _was_ an honorable discharge, after all, and they needed as much manpower as they needed to revamp the military. So I became an instructor, teaching landlubbers how to become proper sailors. Didn't pay as well, but it was better than prison.

_He pauses, looking out to the water._

I remember when I got my first class, full of fresh young faces, boys and girls. Couldn't discriminate after all, not when you needed as many warm bodies to throw at the aliens as possible.

And wouldn't you know, sitting at the front of the class was a certain girl I had met in my previous line of work.

Talk about awkward, huh?

1 This statement is not as great an exaggeration as it may seem. According to a UN study, as many as two hundred million people fled to other nations in the build-up to the war.

-/-\\-

**Traoré I**

_Moussa Traoré greets me at the door to his home in Bamako, Mali. Ushering me in, he has me sit down with him and his family at the dining room table. We hold our interview over plates of Jollof rice, boiled eggs, and steaming green mint tea._  
  
**Q: Thank you for the meal, Professor Traoré.**  
  
A: You are quite welcome. It is always good to share a meal with a guest, especially an amiable one. Care for some more tea?  
  
**Q: Perhaps later. Let me first ask you about the translation project.**  
  
A: Very well. Where would you want me to start? How I became a member of the project, or simply my work on it?  
  
**Q: Perhaps the former would be best.**  
  
A: It is more interesting to start there, I feel. As you may know, Mali is a diverse country, with many languages. Bambara is the most common, but there is also Arabic, French, Maasina Fulfulde, and dozens more. What's more, many of the languages are from different families. Bambara is Mande, French is Indo-European, Arabic is Semetic, and Maasina Fulfude is from the Niger-Congo family. This means there are considerable differences in syntax, morphology, and phonology. Monolingualism is a rarity, here.

I suppose that was considerable help to me in becoming a linguist. Even as a child language fascinated me, how I would speak one tongue with my parents, then use another while I bought vegetables at the market, and used another altogether to read the news. That dance, of going between wildly different ways of expression, pulled me along. My natural talent at the dance made it clear to me that this was what I would pursue as my career. I was already a translator for the United Nations when I was requested to join a think tank, in order to decipher the language of the coming invaders.  
  
**Q: Could you describe that in detail?**  
  
A: Yes. The think-tank consisted of twenty-three other translators and linguists, from all over the world. They came from China, from Egypt, from America, and ten other countries. In addition that core team, there were also numerous mathematicians, cryptologists, and the like. That's not even getting into the technicians operating the supercomputers, and all the people loaned over from various countries' Deep Space Networks. You know what I mean by Deep Space Networks, yes? You know that scene in that really old movie with Jodie Foster, with all the massive antennae in the background as she's sitting her car and listening with headphones? That was the old Deep Space Network used by the Americans. 

**Q: What use did your translation think tank have for supercomputers and equipment meant to direct space probes?**

A: Some of the most vital purposes, my friend! Those antennae had been designed to communicate with piddly little machines with weaker batteries than my phone, across billions of miles. Now, the Conquest Fleet was far farther away from us than even the most distant probe, but their ship to ship transmissions were also much more powerful. Enough that, if we turned their way and strained our ears, we could eavesdrop on their discussions.

That revelation alone was a blessing from God. I don't know if it was an accident, or if they had deliberately turned the networks their way to see if they could pick up communications. All I know is that we were quite fortunate that they did not use laser communications between ships in the fleet, instead blaring it openly across the hydrogen frequency. It was a far cry from the fithp, who were as silent as the grave. After all, they were only one ship, which meant they could hide their secrets within their steel shell.

The think tank was assigned to listen to those transmissions coming from the Conquest Fleet, and attempt to decipher their language for two main reasons. First, to see if we could gleam valuable information for the intelligence agencies, and secondly, to attempt diplomacy.  
  
**Q: I thought it had been agreed at that point that the Race had hostile intent?**  
  
A: Yes, that was the general consensus. However, we decided that if there was any chance, however small, of averting a war, that we would take such a chance.  
  
_Traoré's eldest son, a translator in his own right, pours me some tea. I watch the foam rise, then take a sip._  
  
**Q: How difficult was it to translate the language of the Race?**  
  
A: Very. All languages on Earth have connections to each other, forming families and superfamilies. There are all similarities amongst the Romance languages, for example, and there are broader commonalities between the Romance languages and other Indo-European languages. The same can be said for Niger-Congo languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, and every other possible group. If you knew one language, it would be easier to decipher the languages related to it.  
  
However, the language of the Race had no relations to our languages. It evolved in a completely isolated environment, and was spoken by an entirely different species. There were no related languages that would have made translation easier, and no speakers with whom we could attempt simple dialogues. Even something as simple as a Race male pointing to a rock and saying his word for it would've made things easier.

To make it even worse, much of the data was not verbal chatter between crew, but computer to computer chatter, using codes developed in complete isolation from ours. In that regard it was even harder to decipher than the languages.  
  
**Q: Is this where the supercomputers and non-linguistic specialists came in?**

A: They were also useful with the verbal language, but overall yes. We had what must have been thirty supercomputers engaging in parallel processing- I remember one of the computer specialists telling me they had five hundred petaFLOPS being used to brute-force Race coding. There was also networking between much smaller computers around the world, and much was put in public so amateurs and freelancers could take a crack at the matter.

The core team and I contented ourselves with the audio transmissions. Simply knowing that they communicated verbally, and with a somewhat similar vocal structure to us, made things _much_ easier. Almost immediately we'd decided that they must've had a word order that includes subjects, verbs, and objects. Not necessarily in that order, of course; only forty percent of languages are SVO.  
  
**Q: What order is the Race language in, then?**  
  
A: It is an OSV language, similar to many languages found in the Amazon rainforest. That alone took eighteen months to determine. Thankfully, once that was done, the rest of the deciphering became much easier. We swiftly discerned that the Race language was polysynthetic, meaning that there is a high amount of morphemes. This often leads to them having long words that can act as a sentence on their own. For example, the word _ssuvatalsvabeerts_ means "He has not yet returned home".  
  
It's also a very logical language. Not meaning that the speakers are inherently more logical than us, but meaning that there are fewer linguistic ambiguities. One lesson that stuck with me when I entered college was an example the professor said, stating that the English phrase "I never said she stole my money" can have seven different interpretations depending on inflection and context. In contrast, the Race's language would have seven different sentences for each interpretation.  
  
**Q: How long did it take to decipher the language to the point of intelligibility?**  
  
A: Three years. By the end, six of the linguists and translators had left the program due to a perceived lack of helpfulness, and three others suffered nervous breakdowns from the stress of the work. Newer and much more powerful supercomputers were being devoted to the task with every year, including some that were custom built for the issue, which helped a little, but it was still incredibly difficult work. It would've been all to easy to simple aspects of the language ass-backwards, considering how... well, how _alien_ it was.

Still, I remember that day when I was reading a transcription of a conversation between two technicians on separate ships- as a side note, I _do not_ like the official Romanization of Race-tongue. If you never heard it spoken, you'd think it flowed like a human language for certain terms, or that the writing presented looked like a cat jumped on the keyboard for others. Race-tongue pronounces consonants you see clustered together on paper _individually_. It's not _Atvar_ , it's Ah-tuh-vah-re. Or "at'.va.ɻ" in IPA if you're being technical.

Where was I? Oh yes. I remember the first time I was reading a transcription, and suddenly it was making _sense_ to me. Not some puzzle to crack, but something I'd read like anything else. I remember jumping out of my chair and letting out a little scream when that happened. We'd finally done it. The greatest endeavor in linguistic history had finally paid off, and I had been a part of it.

I still have my Nobel prize around the house, as well as a copy of that issue of TIME where me and the rest of the team are on the cover, with the title _Meet the Team Who Cracked An Alien Language._

 **Q: What happened after that?**  
  
A: The team had done its job, and with that many of us were given the boot, as English speakers say. The skillsets and resources required to decipher an alien language are quite different from the ones required to teach it, or to use it for intelligence purposes. I was actually barred from further examining Race communications, as they feared it could result in security breaches. Instead, I was shuffled into another team, meant to create language courses and to teach other linguists how to speak it, so that they could in turn teach others.

At first, the language courses were directed towards intelligence officers, so they could better analyze ship to ship communications, as well as key government officials around the world. After all, we were still striving to the vain hope of negotiation, and if that were the case we needed ambassadors who speak the language.

It was at my suggestion that the language had public courses on it, including online applications. Many cited it as a wartime contribution- it could allow civilian partisans to intercept Race communications, or to better ingratiate themselves on their occupiers and make their activities less suspicious. However, I did not view it that way. I simply wished for others to share in the joy I had the privilege to experience, speaking a language from another star.

That was two years before the war began. I remember reading that some app... Duolingo? Yes, Duolingo crashed within thirty minutes of Race-tongue becoming available. I think there were five hundred million people using the app to study the language, though most only did it out of initial curiosity. Still, I remember a study that claimed that, six months before the war, there were more L2 speakers of Race-tongue than there were of Russian. I don't know how accurate that was- they probably counted anyone who could form basic sentences.  
  
Regardless, I have no doubt that the work our team did was crucial to what happened next.

-/-\\-

**Ttomalss I**

_Regarded by many troopmales as the best expert on human psychology, Ttolmass spends most of his time at Yale University, where he offers special elective classes in Race history and culture. It is, as he has claimed in prior interviews, the best way to bring us into the 'right culture'. What he means by that has been the subject of much controversy, in both human and Race circles.  
  
He invites me into his office, which is lined with various human books and essays, ranging from psychology to history to plays. "Reading is one of the few things I have aside from work", he explains as we sit down._  
  
**Q: You served as the chief xenopsychologist aboard the Conquest Fleet, but much of your work was overshadowed by the more visible elements of the war. What were the specifics of your job?**  
  
A: As a xenopsychologist, my job was study the human psyche, in order to determine how well your species would integrate into our society. Things such as reproduction and child-rearing, as well as regard for authority. I was expecting fairly easy work in that regard.  
  
_He swivels an eye turret towards the window._  
  
Clearly, I was mistaken.  
  
**Q: I am informed that the Fleetlord commissioned the Fleet's xenopsychologists to study the "Tosevite situation" during the flight through the solar system.**

A: Indeed I was. The memory of waking up to be informed of the, er, _situation_ is crystal clear, despite the fog that comes when you emerge from coldsleep. As soon as I was informed that your species had advanced in an incredibly short time-frame, I knew that I was going to deal with something outside of my expectations.  
  
Nevertheless, I was a male of the Race, chosen for my position by the decree of the Emperor, and I was going to do my job.

I first began with what information I had on my hand- the findings of those first probes we sent to your system centuries ago. Over the course of approximately twenty-five thousand of your years, we have methodically sent probes to every star within eleven light years of Home. Much of that time is due to minimizing of energy expenditures- our probes move at a mere five percent of light-speed, rather than the fifty-five percent our starships accomplish. It took four hundred of our years for the probes to arrive in the Tosev system, which had been the most recent discovery at the time.

**Q: What information did the probes have on humanity?**

A: Not as much as you may think. The probes were more concerned with ascertaining the planet's habitability, as there is only so much you can gleam from distant telescopes. About two thousand years before Tosev, there was another prospective habitable world that was later found by probe to be too cold for our tastes, though your own species may be better suited to its climate. It is still viewed as a holding of the Race, much like every other star we have visited.

We dropped dozens of rovers and landers and even airborne probes all over the planet, taking temperature readings, chemical analyses of the soil, examining biological samples... but most encounters with Tosevites were incidental, scant. I'm sure we accidentally seared ourselves into the memories of some witless peasants from the waning Maya to the Silk Road, and I know for a fact that some were destroyed, but our study of your species was largely confined to matters like "do they exist?" and "what is your basic biology like?".

We didn't care to know about your societies, or your armies. Victory over you was taken for granted, not worthy of reconnaissance.

**Q: They still must have uncovered some information.**

A: Yes. We knew that you were the most biologically distinct sapient species we had encountered- so large, so ugly. The probes had found that Tosev Three was a rather lush world despite being so cold and wet, and that the fecundity of your people was astonishing. And though we did not try very hard to study your technology, your possession of steel and primitive mills showed that you were the most advanced species we had encountered, compared to the Bronze Age Hallessi and copper-wielding Rabotevs.

Between your numbers, large size, and comparatively more advanced technology, it had been determined -quite correctly!- centuries ago that you were going to be the most difficult conquest yet, and we had spent an extra hundred and sixty of our years preparing accordingly when compared to the previous conquests. Of course, to us, the most difficult conquest was no more grave a matter than the most fearsome insect.

I remember spending hours upon hours poring over the few holographic images of your species, from what I now know to be a soldier of _Ikh Mongol Uls_ during the invasion of __Khwārazmshāhiyān__ aiming a bow at the probe, to a small village in the Yucatan Peninsula. I would corroborate with the other xenopsychologists once a day to discuss theories and analysis. That was all we had, you see. Theories, mountains of theories, but _only_ theories. We had no new data to help us determine how you had developed so rapidly.

The best we could determine that the root of the cause lay either in a hitherto-unknown aspect of universal sociology, or your biology and the world that shaped it. Some suggested that perhaps the large oceans on your world provided unique challenges to trade, and it is known across all species -perhaps not the pre-war Fithp- that necessity is the nest that invention's egg hatches from. Another theory was that your large population but limited area meant that information dissemination and feedback loops occurred rather quickly. More people means a higher likelihood of brilliant inventors or more manpower available to important developments, and being so close together meant that great minds and great movements could better corroborate.

However, these theories were unpopular, as it implied that the sudden growth of your species was not an abnormality, but rather the norm for your kind. That implication produced ill odors, as far as we were concerned. A more popular theory was that of the technology explosion.

**Q: Technology explosion?**

A: I argue that it is not a very accurate term, but the venom behind the term when used by Straha made it popular in our circle. The basic tenets of the theory was that all species have a period in their development where they advance much more quickly than before and after. The theory would then mean that the Tosevites' rapid development was simply because they had had their technology explosion rather late in their development, which also had the calming implication that it had already passed. I still remember my excitement as I suggested that this revelation could help us unlock our own prehistory, that perhaps the Race had its technology explosion earliest in its development, hence its supremacy.

That had been the prevailing theory as I went into coldsleep along with the other scientists. The next cycle of scientists, who operated for half of our year, held onto it.

Then when I woke for the third cycle -as the chief expert I was expected to work for multiple cycles- we received a hammer to the tailstump.

**Q: Was that when the first of the UN contact packages arrived?**

A: About three weeks in, yes. I remember one of my junior assistants actually screaming when the _Hetto_ 's computer notified us of an unknown radio transmission. After all, it was proof that you definitively knew we were coming, and his panicked mind accidentally jumped to many correct conclusions. At the time we managed to brush it off, as it was only natural you would notice our photon rockets. The Rabotevs and Hallessi saw, and had put it in primitive records- they were just too primitive to know what the lights in the sky were.

For about a week we couldn't actually truly receive the message, as it was not meant for digital processing. I decided to wake the technician who had first detected the Tosevite radio signals, that poor Erewlo fellow, and asked him about it. He blurted something about cathodes and then rocked in his tube.

I didn't even know what a cathode was, but one of my junior assistants was a hobbyist who loved to dive into the lowest levels of archives back on Home and recreate primitive technologies. He had even made crude props as we discussed your medieval development, but I digress. He had an old cathode-ray machine he had built for fun, and we had Erelwo jury-rig something so that we could use it to interpret the signals.

On that small grainy screen, we were shown the contact package, and could finally begin to absorb how far you had come.

**Q: What did you see?**

A: Enough.

_He scratches his chin._

The information within was very similar to your Voyager probes' Golden Records. Greetings in multiple languages, music, images. I was one of the first of the Race to hear "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by that particularly large Hawaiian, which was played so often by staff that I heard it in my nightmares, but that was honestly one of the least problematic things. The images showed many basic aspects of your life, such as you eating food, or rowing over a lake, but it also showed off much of your technology. From that first package we knew you had discovered the atom, computers, flight, and more.

Yet, it was still frustratingly sparse. You had been wise to withhold information on your military technology- we had no idea if you still used bows or had weapons greater than explosive metal bombs. We knew nothing of the exact nature of your population centers, your industries... we had to infer much. I managed to ascertain that your world was still not unified, much like the pre-conquest Rabotevs, as the greetings had such a broad range of phonology that I knew they had to be of different languages. The images of ovum and uteruses indicated live birth and that you raised your own young, which would make some aspects of assimilation difficult.

_He trails off, glancing outside once again._

What frightened me the most was that image of a Tosevite standing on your massive moon. It wasn't just that you had spaceflight, you see, though that was indeed terrifying. Rather, it was the fact that the picture was clearly old, compared to the newer images of spaceflight. Your technology had developed visibly as you ventured out, yet the lack of signals elsewhere in the system indicated that you hadn't been in space for very long.

The next contact package was much simpler, on par with the Arecibo message, but it was meant to be interpreted by our computers. That had only solidified a revelation I had silently considered for several cycles.

If the technology explosion was a true phenomenon, then you were still in the middle of it. And we still had a long way to go.

-/-\\-

**Harpanet I**

_Though visibly exhausted by the effort, Harpanet insists we go on a walk around the White House grounds as we talk, citing a need for fresh air. Despite being middle-aged, his skin is wrinkled and loose about his large frame, a mark many former warrior fithp bear after returning to civilian life. A quartet of Secret Service agents, one of whom is also a fi', flank us as we walk._

**Q: Thank you for your time, Advisor Harpanet. I know you have a busy schedule.**

A: There is no need to give thanks, Loremaster. It is important that we better understand the past of our herds, lest we make the same mistakes.

**Q: I agree. If you don't mind, I'd like to get into it.**

A: Lead me.

**Q: As an Octuplet-Leader of the Chtaptisk Fithp, how aware were you of the overall strategy being developed by your superiors?**

A: More than one may think, though not because I was an Octuple-Leader. As a member of the Spaceborn herd, I was part of the group that occupied most of the command structure of _Thuktun Flishithy_. There was lingering friction between the Sleeper herd and the Spaceborn, largely showing itself through the dissident view that we should leave Winterhome alone and take the asteroids for ourselves. After all, we had been mated to a small moon of the ringed world you named Saturn, replenishing our depleted reserves of water and allowing our garden to blossom more beautifully than it had in years. Peaceful life with the belt seemed tempting to many.

As a member of the Spaceborn herd, one who occupied a high rank among the warriors as an Octuple-Leader, my mind was a battleground upon which the two factions would argue. You had the dissidents who would tell me things my current herd would describe as above my pay grade, in an attempt to sway me to their side and indicate to leadership that the warriors themselves were wary.

**Q: What sorts of things would they tell you?**

A: Many things. "Oh Harpanet, did you hear that the Winterhome fithp don't fight the way we do? " the occasional high-ranking dissident would tell me. "Perhaps they will not surrender, like an entire planet of rogues. You wouldn't wish to throw yourself against such madness, would you?"

"Oh Harpanet, another traveling herd is bearing to Winterhome. If we don't stay in the belt, they may conquer us as well."

And then I would be approached by fellow Spaceborn, who wanted the warriors to stay resolute. "Oh Harpanet, I know those cowardly dissidents wouldn't want me to tell you this, but the Herdmaster knows conquest will be easy. There's another herd traveling to Winterhome. We can let the two tear at each other until they are too weak to resist us."

"Oh Harpanet, rumor is that the planet is divided fiercely between rival herds. We can divide and conquer them. Oh Harpanet, the dissidents don't want you to know this, but this moon may be used as a weapon to cow the Winterhome fithp into line."

Between the two, I had an astonishingly clear picture of what the strategy we would employ.

**Q: Which was?**

A: That we would buy ourselves time by resupplying with our mated moon and pushing it, so that the other traveling herd would arrive at Winterhome before we did. We would not arrive _too_ late, however, as we did not want the destructive war to render much of the planet unusable.

Then we would arrive and scour the orbitals, before choosing certain herds and landing in fertile regions after weakening their remaining military infrastructure. We would ensure they were herds with many enemies, so we could conquer them unmolested, and then we would do the same to other herds, gaining strength with the subsumed herds.

**Q: Why fertile regions?**

A: We felt that your herd would be far less willing to contaminate your breadbaskets with fallout than you would a desert or tundra. Successful nuclear strikes were undesirable, naturally. Even if losses were minimal, it would still make the planet less and less desirable. We were already appalled by your willingness to soil your own garden.

**Q: And yet you were bringing the Foot along?**

_Harpanet falls silent for a few moments._

A: More than anything, the existence of the Foot was what made my desire to live on a world falter the most. As a Spaceborn, I had been raised to hate the metal halls and the nonexistent sky, even though I did not know what a sky was. When I was a calf, my parents would walk me along the garden in the heart of _Thuktun Flishithy_ , telling me that there was a greater garden waiting for us. A garden filled with great ponds, ponds that could stretch so far you could not see the other side, so deep that you could sink for hours and not reach the bottom. A garden with things like sand, and fog, and great rocks taller than the world I lived in.

For a young spaceborn who could walk the width of his world in less than a day, a garden so great it would take years to walk around sounded like paradise. And yet, for four years in the orbit of Saturn, set black against those beautiful scintillating rings that I wish to see once more before I die, was a weapon meant to destroy gardens.

I still sided with conquest. The dream of the Spaceborn burned too strongly in me to quell, and the exhaustion of resupplying at the Foot had turned the prospect of peaceful life in the belt unappealing. I would tell myself that the Foot would not actually be used, once the Winterhome fithp saw sanity and surrendered, and that I would stand beneath that beautiful sky.

It seems that one of the universals of culture, no matter what world you hail from, is hypocrisy. It was a lesson we would soon learn in the war to come.

-/-\\-

**USA Today Article, November 19th, 2016**

**_VERNE'S FICTION MADE REALITY  
US Tests First Anti-Orbital Weapons Platform_ **

TAMPA- With a resounding crack that silences the spectators gathered along the five-meter fence, a new world of warfare is opened less than an hour's drive from the location an inadvertent prophet wrote it would begin.

At first glance, the squat dome resting on a small hill outside of Tampa resembles a massive reflector telescope painted in camouflage, but the first emplacement of the USAAF's planned Anti-Orbital Defense Network is not meant to observe celestial objects. It is meant to shoot them.

"The idea of a gun meant to send objects into space is old, definitely older than most people know," says Jason Cho, head of the engineering project tasked with developing the network, called COLUMBIAD. "Jules Verne wrote about the idea a full hundred years before we landed on the Moon, back in a time when no one else was seriously thinking about sending objects into space."

Of course, many differences exist between the space gun of Verne's imagination and the weapon that had its first test-firing today. The technologies involved are simultaneously far more advanced, and with far smaller ambitions. Rather than filling a nine-hundred foot hole in the ground with a hundred and eighty tons of gun cotton in order to launch a twenty-ton shell to the Moon, Cho's gun uses magnetic rails, which had been previously tested by the Navy in 2008, to launch a five-thousand pound (2267 kg) projectile to low Earth orbit.

Perhaps the most crucial difference is that Verne's gun was a tool of sending a piece of the world into the heavens. Cho's gun, on the other hand, is meant to keep the heavens out of the world.

"If everything goes as planned, COLUMBIAD will become the forefront of the United States' defense against the extraterrestrial aggressors," says Cho. "Control of the orbitals will dictate control of the war, and this defense network will keep the aggressors from dominating our airspace."

Though today's test only reached an apogee of a hundred miles before plunging into the Gulf of Mexico about three hundred miles downrange, Cho is hopeful that later high-power tests will reach the proposed maximum range of four hundred miles within the month. Should that be the case, then construction of seventy more platforms across the country will begin January of next year. Each station will also have four COIL (chemical oxygen infrared laser) emitters, which had a successful test last year, with purposes ranging from blinding alien surveillance equipment to destroying landing craft.

Criticism of the project, however, has been abound.

"Sedentary defenses have always been vulnerable to air attack, and nowhere will that vulnerability be pronounced than when the attacker is in space," says Chinese Defense Minister Zhou Miao. "The United States risks spending billions of dollars making nothing but orbital target practice. I maintain that our ally must consider focusing funds on less risky projects, such as our own anti-satellite missile program. To do otherwise may weaken itself in the face of this invasion, and if a major ally falls we may all be doomed."

"Even if you can hit objects in low Earth orbit, they might react by putting themselves into a higher orbit and render the things useless," says Dr. Kanukuri Ramanaidu, head of India's own anti-orbital defense project, codenamed ARJUNA. "If they can cross the incomprehensible gap between stars, they can move out of such weapons' reach. The only saving grace would be if the enemy had to enter within range to effectively use their own weapons."  
  
Despite criticism, Cho and his team remains optimistic.  
  
"The defense network's use of railguns will make its detection far harder than with missiles and even laser emitters, and it is far harder to defend against a solid projectile than a missile or laser. And even if the fleet can stay out of range in orbit, they will still have to land if they wish to occupy the planet, and that'll make them sitting ducks."  
  
Regardless of opinions at the governmental level, the public at large seems to be enamored with the concept, if the excited crowd at the test firing site holds any implication.  
  
"Look at that beauty," says Raul Turner, a 43 year old Tampa resident as he watches the test firing. "That thing could knock down 'em ships from Independence Day."  
  
"I remember watching a movie that shows how scary paint flecks are in orbit," exclaims Nancy Young, age 19. " _Paint flecks_. A bullet that big would punch through just about anything."  
  
The realization of Verne's dream seems to have had a good impact on morale. Whether that will be the only impact it makes or not, only time will tell.

-/-\\-

**Ibe I**

_The residence in Yenagoa is surprisingly small, with only a single floor, and a small gate. I am given a brief pat down before I can enter, then I am ushered into the humble abode of one of the most famous, and controversial, figures in post-war history. A short, powerful-looking man, Nwashuku Ibe is sitting on the living room floor, drinking a glass of warm soy milk. He offers me a firm handshake, and requests that I sit on the floor as well as we talk._  
  
**Q: Good afternoon, President Ibe.**  
  
A: A good afternoon to you as well. There is no need to be so stiff; I am fond of your work. Please, ask ahead.  
  
**Q: Very well. As many are already aware, you were part of the Delta Freedom movement, before the war. How did you join that organization?**  
  
A: Because I am Ijaw. _Laughs._ No, no, there is more to that. I feel many still do not know of the conflict before the Lizards came. It was only a generation ago, and yet everything before the war seems shrouded in myth, like a long-forgotten time. I suppose it can be forgiven; what was lost during the war cannot be regained, and what we gained after cannot be taken away.  
  
I was a young man during that time, baby-faced and knobby-knee'd when I the Delta Justice Mandate. It was a nonviolent protest group, doing marches and sit-ins. My job at the time was largely to hand out pamphlets alongside my brother, Mujahid.  
  
**Q: Against what, exactly?**  
  
A: Oil companies, both foreign and domestic. These capitalists had stayed after the end of British rule in old Nigeria, but under other skins. Through bribery and economic coercion, they were allowed by the government to continue sucking oil from our lands. They ravaged the environment here, _here,_ in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. They cut down forests for facilities and excavations, they polluted our rivers with waste products as they took and refined the oil, and they caused us much grief as a result.  
  
And despite the billions of dollars they got, we stayed undeveloped. Good hospitals and schools were scarce. We lived in squalor next to wealthy capitalists that took the resources from our land.  
  
There had been movements agains the companies for decades. It was mainly nonviolent, until the government sent in troops to quell us, and killed Ogoni leaders. They declared our opposition to the exploitation _treason_. Then, it became militarized.  
  
I was still part of a small, nonviolent group. We continued to march, and hold sit-ins, up until the announcement of the coming invasion. Things changed after that.

**Q: Because of the initial panic, or something else?**

A: The initial panic was like a gentle breeze before the storm that hammered us. Very swiftly, the grip on the region tightened. They stopped bothering with even a modicum of nonlethal combat, trading in rubber bullets for lead. Laws against protests were strengthened, punishments made harsher. Once again, protesting the oil companies in the region became known as treason.

**Q: Why?**

A: What else? The "developed world". Even in times of peace industrialized nations were like frenzied beasts, guzzling down billions of gallons of the stuff, only for their appetites to grow with each drop instead of ever being sated. They loved what it gave them, both the governments and the people. Oil was quite literally power. They didn't want to conserve it, they didn't want to consider what it did to the world. They just wanted to expand their interests, to drive bigger cars, to make the squiggly line of "the economy" go higher and higher, even if that didn't actually mean anything.

That desire for oil was like the furnaced jaws of Moloch, and the people of the Delta were the children being cast into that brazen stomach.

And _that_ was before the discovery of the coming invasion.

After, the beast became something different. For once, the industrialized world halted its incessant waste and began to speak of preserving the earth, but these were cynical measures. It took the existential threat of an invasion from another world to make them admit that they needed to conserve their oil resources, and even in my youth I had no doubt that it would be back to business as usual if they survived relatively intact.

Yet, their demands for oil only grew stronger with the revelation of the invaders. After all, they were facing being cut off from their supplies of oil while also having to fuel the largest and mightiest armies ever seen on the face of this earth. And so at the same time as they made ration cards or license plate tickets, as renewable energy became increasingly in demand, they took even greater amounts of oil from places like the Delta, making strategic reserves.

As far as they were concerned, they needed to protect that lifeline, and with force. Oh, wars may have ceased in the face of the coming fleets, but I saw quite a few Americans and Chinese and British around in my neck of the woods. If they didn't wish to waste bodies, they were perfectly willing to lend the government money and guns as part of "defensive pacts", even if those bullets found Ijaw before they found Lizard.

**Q: A common argument in favor of the peacekeeping efforts is that stable extraction was vital to global defense. What is your thought on the matter?**

A: My thought is that maybe if they hadn't been greedy murderous bastards for decades on end, they wouldn't have "needed" to suck the Delta dry. Renewable energy technologies have been around for decades, and yet they never bothered to implement them until it was suddenly vital to defense.

My _thought_ is that even if oil was needed, there were plenty of other places they could extract from. Old Russia was the largest producer on the planet, and OPEC was producing plenty. If they actually cared about the environment like they said they did, they wouldn't have despoiled the Delta for a little oil. If they were keen on preserving human life like they said they were, they would have paid generously and actually strived to help the Delta peoples instead of discarding them aside.

They never _cared_. As far as they were concerned, Africans died like flies all the time- what was a few more to preserve the actually important countries?  
  
And as far as I was concerned, preparing to fight the aliens mattered little when we were already under occupation. I had that lesson painfully impressed upon me, when I saw Mujahid's brains spatter against the wall mere moments after he pushed me into an alleyway to flee "peacekeepers". It was that day I joined the Delta Freedom Movement and became a fighter.  
  
**Q: You committed acts of terrorism?**  
  
A: Call it what you like. Terrorism, guerrilla fighting, or a struggle for freedom. I applaud those who have fought for their freedom without raising a hand, but these capitalists did not care for peaceful protest. If they had to kill us all to keep the oil, then they were willing to do it.  
  
It was not an easy fight. Turnover was high, due to the increasing intensity of the fight, as we became more steadfast and they less forgiving. And yet, the entire Delta had been engulfed by our uprisings at that point, as for every one they killed, three more rose up to avenge their friends and brothers. Some weapons found their way into our hands, courtesy of some sympathetic groups, and as much as they hated us, some countries found use in us. The conflict had hardened us, after all, providing lessons in how to wage guerilla warfare against a much larger foe. Many of our captured members were offered clemency if they helped teach other groups across the continent how to fight, but against invading aliens instead of Shell.

When the invasion finally began, the war had already been long-fought by us. I was second-in-command of the entire organization by the time of Landing Day, five years after I joined.

_He frowns._

I was nineteen.

-/-\\-

**Yáng I**

_Despite her advanced age, Yáng Lán still works as a teacher in Mangya, a town in the old Haixi Mongol Autonomous County of Qinghai province. The town was small before the war, with only 33,000 people calling it home, and now the population is best measured in hundreds.  
  
We meet in her school, a three-room building one story high, on the outskirts of the old town. Despite being 87 years old, she still insists on standing as she lectures her four students, and serves them their meals for their lunch break. I sit across from her as we talk, the students eating besides her._  
  
**Q: You've lived in Qinghai for most of your life, and have been a teacher for the past sixty three years. What kept you in Mangya?**  
  
A: If I left, there would be no one else for them.  
  
_She gestures to her students._  
  
The generations who lived in the shadow of the war do not remember what our nation used to be like. Constantly changing. My home did not have electricity when I was young, or even when I was older for that matter. _[Laughs]._ My parents had never seen an automobile until they were middle-aged. In many ways, life seemed to have barely changed since the time of the Qing Dynasty.  
  
Then, in less than a lifetime, we had railways stretching everywhere, including one that passed... _still_ passes, near this town. People who went to the East to work would come back with stories of how the cities seemed to grow more and more with each passing week, skyscrapers rising in a matter of weeks. My goodness, we even had two spaceports within a few hundred miles of here.  
  
I'm sorry for rambling. I feel like I'm giving a lesson.  
  
_She pauses to solve a dispute between two students over cabbage, then turns back to me._  
  
What I mean, is that in this great change, many things stayed the same. For other rural communities, they grew richer and more sophisticated, but we stayed poor here. We, like many others, were left behind, running to catch up.  
  
I was lucky to be carried along. I am Hui, and back then the policies gave me extra points on the gāokâo1, so I managed to receive a good education in Xī'ān. That was truly a changing city. It used to have less than half a million people when I was young, and when I arrived to study it had more than doubled.  
  
But those rising towers did not blind me to the plight of those left behind. When I spoke with my parents, they told me of how many others had to leave their children behind to work in the big cities. Tens of millions of children, left with ailing grandparents and teachers as caretakers.  
  
So, I resolved to return home, and I have taught here ever since. For many of the children, I was the only solid figure in their lives as I taught them what I had learned in China's future. And all around me, over the decades, the country's industry continued to grow. Even if the fruits did not fall into our mouths, I could still see the trees being planted in the distance. Railways, wind farms, power plants.  
  
**Q: And then the fleets were discovered.**  
  
A: Yes. Everyone has their story of when the news was released, and I have mine. I was teaching, here, when one of the students' parents came barging in, screaming of how a fleet of a thousand ships was coming from another star to take this world from us. He had already known that it would be years before they arrived, but his panic made us thought it was happening right then and there.  
  
_She shakes her head._  
  
My son is not a smart man.  
  
I digress again. Even after the initial panic was resolved, and I gave my son a good whack over the head, a great unease had fallen here.  
  
**Q: Did the remoteness of this town have any impact on how people reacted to the news?**  
  
A: I suppose in a sense, yes. We knew of what was happening in other nations. The day of chaos America had, the suicides in Brazil, the quiet masses in Botswana. But we did not see these things, and we did not care much for these things. The world was always changing greatly around us without paying us thought, and we had learned to return the favor.  
  
But we still worried here. A hush fell on the town, an unspoken fear. We knew nothing of the aliens yet. We had never even thought of such a thing, not when we had far more pressing matters. When you live in this cold place, surrounded by nothingness, in turn surrounded by mountains, it can be easy to forget the world outside.  
  
They made it impossible to forget what was above us, however. Their mere existence had shaken us, for they had cracked our sky open and brought portents of doom. Doom!  
  
_One of the students jolts. She assuages him._  
  
**Q: Could you elaborate on your emphasis on "doom"? It adds an interesting connotation.**  
  
A: We lived in interesting times. No, that's not a good way of saying it. I suppose you're my fifth student for this day, no?  
  
The end of the world is not so familiar to us as it is to Westerners. I blame their faith in the cross for that. In our stories, in our myths, there is always a beginning, but almost never an end. At least, the end isn't permanent. It's just same old, same old. Like the cycle of dynasties. The world's still there, isn't it? Most of us never really played with the idea of the _whole_ thing ending.  
  
The idea of the apocalypse, that fascination- no, obsession- with doomsday is strange. I remember an author my grandson adored, who spoke of how his writing of the apocalypse through a Chinese eye was part of why his stories were so successful.  
  
If I recall, those books got very popular right before the war.  
  
**Q: So you would say that the discovery of the Conquest Fleet brought about apocalyptic sentiments?**  
  
A: Yes. Everyone had it. Oh, are you talking about my town or the country? It's obvious the outside world had it-  
  
**Q: Let's go with your community.**  
  
A: For here, everyone had their own "doomsday moment". A sudden realization, that instead of just a war or some unreal-feeling thing out of some silly book, we were finally looking at what may be the definitive end of the world. The end of _everything_.  
  
For some, it was when people began to move. Not move away for work, but just _leaving_ , abandoning villages they had lived in their entire lives and going to the cities. Those same mountains that isolated us, they made some of us feel vulnerable. After all, we are on the roof of the world, closer to the sky than any other peoples, and for some that made it feel like we were closer to the invaders as well.  
  
The night sky became a terror for many. They couldn't bear to look at the sky and see the lights those ships made. I could bear it, but I would often get terrible dreams.  
  
**Q: When was your doomsday moment?**  
  
A: I remember my doomsday moment too clearly. It had come later than others. I was already an old, stubborn woman. I had lived through people rushing _to_ the mountains during the Cultural Revolution, and all the trouble that had brought. I had gotten old in a nation that seemed to change every time I opened my eyes.  
  
It came slowly. It started with the abandonment of the villages, but it was much worse when the construction equipment pulled away. For the first time in my long life, I had finally seen the endless growth of my country stop cold, then recede back to the coast like a great wave. The smaller wave of men constructing pillboxes and planting charges along the railways also weighed heavily on me as they came and went, especially as they rolled tanks to Xīnjiāng and Xīzàng.  
  
But it was when I was one of only three teachers who had remained in this entire town, when in the third year those polite men in uniforms came to my school. When they sat me down, and had me relate to the children how to hold a gun and how to make improvised bombs...  
  
_She wipes at the corner of her eye._  
  
That was when I finally admitted to myself that we were facing the end of the world.

1 Chinese college entrance examination

-/-\\-

**New York Times Article, August 15th, 2018**

**_THE YEAR WITHOUT CHILDREN_ **  
_**Birth rate reaches unprecedented low** _

CHEYENNE- Just five years ago, Rossman Elementary School had more than 350 students. Now, there are only twenty three. Each grade can fit comfortably in a single classroom, eerily empty without the desks and supplies of before. In some rooms, there can be as many as three teachers, engaging in focused instruction with a handful of children.  
  
"Sometimes, I feel like I'm trespassing onto an abandoned school," says Ms. May, a twenty six year-old teacher, now in charge of the entire third grade. "It used to be lively, with buses coming in and parents dropping off their kids every morning. But now? I get an entire parking row to myself, and there's no hustle when I walk in. It's freaky."  
  
Rossman is not an isolated example. Across the world, reported numbers of students have dropped significantly, to the point that some schools, and even entire districts, have closed doors. In the Alto Department of Paraguay, all schools have coalesced in two former high schools in the capital of Fuerte Olimpo.  
  
"There just aren't enough students to justify having more schools," claims Guille Luis Velazquez, the superintendent in charge of Alto's education department. "Older students started dropping out to go work, or to hold down the house while their parents work. Many parents have started working much farther from home, joining the army or making defenses. And there's barely any children coming in. Less than a tenth of before, I'd say."  
  
Velazquez would be quite accurate in his math. In 2014, the opening of the Invasion Crisis, there were an estimated 140 million births. In 2015, that number halved, then continued to plummet to its current rate of 15 million births a year. This marks the lowest the number of annual births has been since the First World War and Spanish Influenza a century ago, according to some estimates.  
  
Reasons for this unprecedented drop in births are numerous, ranging from the increase in political instability in many nations around the world, the drain of non-war related industries and infrastructure to fuel global defense preparations, and workers spending far more time away from home. However, all of these issues lead back to a singular reason, one that is painfully obvious.  
  
"No one wants to raise kids when the world might end soon," Zeynep Ozkok, a Turkish construction worker in Instanbul states. Ozkok, who has been married for the past two years as she helps make emergency shelters, speaks bluntly as to why she doesn't plan on having children. "Why bother? It's cruel to give them life just in time for the aliens to take it all away."  
  
The sentiment has been echoed around the world, from internet posts to even politics, such as when President Sharif of Pakistan controversially advised his constituents to "build bombs and tanks, not families". In an extensive study conducted over the past year by Oxford University, over 90% of childless married couples cite the incoming invasion as their primary reason for not having children.  
  
The impact of the decline in birthrate has gone beyond empty schools, however. The same study also indicates that the reduced amount of children has induced a "doomsday sense" in many, which is associated with increased anxiety, depression, and even suicides.  
  
"It's like the Rapture, you know?" says Ms, May. "The children are disappearing, and the streets are getting emptier and emptier. I mean, knowing that the... uh... well, the maybe-apocalypse is coming via aliens is bad enough, but this is rubbing it into our face."  
  
The streets are indeed getting emptier. While the birthrate has dropped, the deathrate has actually increased, due to the same factors. For the first time since the Black Death, the seemingly endless growth of the human population has been halted and reversed, something that even the Second World War failed to accomplish.  
  
"Amazing, isn't it?" Zeynep laughs. "They haven't even arrived yet and they're already thinning our numbers. From the edge of the solar system, they're choking us in their grip."  
  
Nevertheless, despite the negative impacts of the lowered birthrate, silver linings remain. With a smaller influx of students, schools worldwide have been able to focus more resources, while also allowing more funds to be diverted to the defense efforts without strain.  
  
"I've been able to engage with my students in a way I could never have done before the discovery," Ms. May says, a faint smile appearing. "Their grades have been up, and they've been showing so much more interest in the subject matter."  
  
The picture is clear. The threat of the alien invasion coming to our world has left a tremendous impact on our morale, an impact that shows itself in many ways, but hope continues to shine through. Perhaps it is these hopes that shall keep us all going through the dark times ahead.

-/-\\-

**Scrapbook I**

_"I remember when I was in freshman year, before the Discovery, the army recruiters were a lot like used cars salesmen. "Hey, wanna join up! Believe me when I say it will be the best decision of your life! What, PTSD and crippling injuries? Pffft, just sign up and you'll be the envy of the school." Only the really desperate kids or the meatheads went there._

_Sophomore year, the recruiters were still kinda like that, but space flavored, you know? Hey, you like Halo, don't you? Wanna shoot aliens like Master Chief, but for real? I swear once a month they made us watch really crappy videos to get us psyched up about fighting the aliens, with crappy CGI of F-22s dogfighting 'alien' aircraft and stuff. Even then they were a bit more serious about how it was going to be dangerous work, but we should be proud to serve our country._

_Junior year, an entire wall of the cafeteria had permanent booths where there'd be recruiters for all the branches, and instead of being really pushy they got pretty blunt, because they knew we were going to see them at some point. Had to take a bunch of tests to figure out where I'd probably end up. No one was really asking about college or cushy benefits._

_Senior year? They were basically as grim as the goddamn grave. They didn't even act like recruiters anymore- none of the fake smiles, just weary nods and deep frowns as they explained what they needed. Every time they just said "I can't lie about the odds, but you're doing a service." After graduation, when me and everyone else went to finalize the papers still dressed in the robes, the recruiter looked like he was going to cry."_

**\- Brynne Browning, from Cambridge, Massachusetts.**

_"What was that you said, my guy?  
All of us are gonna die?  
They be more a lot more advanced  
Hell we may just be a hill of ants  
But we ain't gonna die my guy.  
_

_There might be one more comin'  
And its lasers might be hummin'  
But we ain't gonna die my guy._

_We might be all divided  
_ _Which gets ET real excited,  
_

_They might win without a shot  
Cuz they make our brains go rot,  
_

_They might just call it a day  
And push a rock in our way,  
_

_But...  
_

_Damn.  
_

_Guess I can't tell a lie,  
We probably gonna die,  
But at least we gonna try?"_

**\- An excerpt from "At Least We Gonna Try?", by rock band _The Sufficient Velociteers._ It is believed to be the most popular song of 2017.**

_"We Were Here"_

**\- Graffiti message accompanied by an outline of a human hand that became prevalent pre-war in abandoned sites, with over eighteen thousand documented locations.**

_"Oh, back then the wait was bloody terrible, mate. I know it's nice to get a head start, but there's only so long a head start has before it feels a bit much, right? The important stuff felt like it got done early on, with opening up the drafts and churning out all those bombs and tanks, and then the rest was just hellish waiting. It was like, okay I can give up the movies, yeah I'll quit the cafe and start making grenades, but does it really have to be so early mate? They ain't even here yet and we're acting like bombs with "made in space" stenciled on the side are already falling._

_The bloody aliens had so much time to rub it in our face, right? It was hard to enjoy anything when you knew that at a hard date it was probably going to end. Oh, you got it on with a fit bird? Aw sorry mate, if you have kids they'll probably die in three years, and you shouldn't be getting close either. You got a raise? Aw sorry mate, it's ain't like you got nothing nice to spend it on, and when the aliens take over that money will only be good for toilet paper. Found a nice tea shop? Aw sorry mate, the aliens decided they're going to make that their capital building once they settle in._

_Honestly it made me want the UN or someone to radio the aliens and ask "Can you hurry up a smidge? The wait's fucking killing me."_

**\- Geoffrey Copper, from London, England.**

_The distant lights in the sky  
Cannot help but draw the eye.  
Under their pinprick gaze  
Has life turned to grey haze.  
In fear of that pale light  
Man has prepared its might.  
We have traded days with our sons  
So that we may toil and make guns.  
No one dares to have a daughter  
Before the coming worldwide slaughter.  
We have banished all our mirth  
For the survival of our blue Earth.  
The day will come where they arrive,  
And we will fight like rats to survive._

_But that day is not yet here._

_They have stretched our twilight to a day  
And in its wretchedness we shall stay.  
Oh, God, do I truly hate.  
This unbearably Long Wait._

**\- The Long Wait, by Arthur Chu. Published June 16th, 2019.**

-/-\\-

**Kovár I**

_Otesanek's Nursery is a small toy-store in Prague of local acclaim- the owner and sole worker of the store, Dobromira Kovár, hand-makes all the toys herself. She agrees to meet me after closing down for the night, and we hold our interview in the store, no bigger than a bedroom._

_Kovár, a retired corporal in the Czech Army, is quite similar to the dolls she sells- round-cheeked, wide-smiled, and composed of wood. She takes off a colorfully painted peg-leg and lays it on the table as she sits down, patting it absent-mindedly._

**Q: Thank you for your time, Ms. Kovár. If I may begin, I would like to start with what your life was like before the war.**

A: It was very much like it was after the war, give or take a few parts.

_She holds up the leg and laughs._

Quite literally!

Ah, where was I? Oh, before the war. Yes, before the war I was part of my father's business. He was a puppeteer, you know. Puppetry is highly regarded here, not as a triviality but as art that can be called beautiful, and my father's work was beautiful indeed. He made puppets of kings and queens, fairies and goblins, and even living people like the American president. He'd do shows in the park during festivals, and sometimes he'd even go to schools and do historical reenactments for the little children. He had passion for the craft, and that passion was passed down to me.

By the time of the discovery, I was, oh, twenty-seven. My father was on the older side, and his hands were getting too arthritic to carve, but he still did the puppet shows all by himself. I took over making the puppets, though my father felt he had a lot to teach me yet and so would sit by my side, pointing at mistakes with a finger that looked like three walnuts glued together.

On the day the Fleet was discovered, my father decided to host a puppet show, even though the world outside was losing his mind. I remember asking him how he could be so calm, why he would be hosting a show _now_. He told me that his grandfather did the same when the fascists came to our country, and his father followed in those footsteps during the terror of the missile crisis in Cuba.

"Dobra," he told me while setting up puppet of the dragon St. George killed, "sometimes it's the littlest things that give us hope everything will be alright."

A few people actually did go to see his show that morning.

_She absentmindedly rubs her wooden nose._

Hard to believe him at the time. Back then, it felt like there was no hope.

**Q: Many who lived during the pre-war period described the years between the discovery and the war as "the long wait". Would you describe it as such?**

A: Like a long wait to dive into the pool, yeah. Have you ever been to those public pools with that really tall diving board? The one all the kids wait in line just to jump like four meters into the water. We were like a kid waiting to go in, who at first didn't want to go. Then you had all your friends encouraging you, and you're like "you can do this!" and you do a little silly fist pump as you climb the ladder.

But then you see kid after kid take the plunge, some screaming, some flailing, some hitting the water with a slap that sounds as painful as it is. You can't jump in yet, and there's only so much stretching you can do, and so you start thinking. I'm not that good a swimmer, am I? I've never dived this high before. What if I land wrong and break something? I can't see the deep end's bottom; what if I sink all the way down and can't get back up? Soon, that's all you can think about.

That was what the wait for the war was like. Oh sure, after the first panic we had things to boost the morale. World peace was a thing we talked about a lot back then, and it helped create that sense of togetherness, that it was _everyone_ against this. You saw news videos of all the massive armies being built up, all the new weapons the world was preparing, all the propaganda, and you thought "we can do this!".

But that was like a weak fire on a cold winter night, giving us only a little warmth for a little while. And now we lost all the other things to give us comfort.

**Q: You're talking about the gutting of the entertainment sector and other "non-vital" industries for the war effort.**

A: I am intimately familiar with that. You had the bigger, obvious things. All those millions of people working in tv or film, all those app programmers and game developers, they were scattered to the armies and the factories. I saw theaters close left and right across the city, since even the theater workers were getting drafted or assigned new jobs. New cars weren't getting made either, because of the gas rationing and the need for war factories. One by one, all of the "frivolous" things disappeared. No new movies, no new shows, no new games or cute costumes for your dog...

...no more toys.

My father was heartbroken when I received a letter in the mail telling me that I was to work in a munitions factory an hour away from home, because it meant I could no longer help him with the puppet shows. He wept in front of me when I left for my first day of work, because it meant his last. I wept too. I don't know if you can understand how much I hated making bombs, making _killing_ things instead of things meant to bring joy.

That time was almost caustic, like acid. People were miserable, and it made them want to throw their misery at things that weren't. I remember in the news when politicians and talking heads would point at something like an arcade that was still open because the owner was too old to fight or go the factories, and they'd scream "Why is this still here?! Why aren't they contributing to the war effort?! Don't they know the survival of the human race is at stake?!" And so the owner would close the shop and wallow in sad retirement like my father and countless others.

It felt like a grey time, even though the weather was actually getting more beautiful than it had been in far too long. That's why all the photos and paintings and movies of life in the time are in black and white, because it's hard to hammer the message in when you have the most gorgeous fall weather going on.

The weather might not have been grey, but the people were, dressed in shabby hand-me-downs with bad haircuts and no make-up. The long wait was like being constricted, held in place and choking. The anxiety was so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife, and it was killing us. Suicides were high, preventable workplace accidents were abound, and peoples' health was suffering. Total war isn't possible- we just can't dedicate our minds like that, not without breaking somewhere. We were struggling against that constriction- I remember the violence of a protest against ration cards here in this city.

**Q: I imagine such outbursts were condemned by many as treasonous to the human race.**

A: Oh, they were, but after a while the constant remarks lose their sting. Hard to care about that sort of thing when you feel like you're already dying. I think a writer of fantasy stories once said that while things like art aren't necessary to life, they make life worth living.

People needed the slightest relief, and so it was only natural that it happened.

**Q: What happened?**

A: One day, maybe three years after the Discovery, I was walking back from the bus stop when I saw a crowd milling in the park. Big crowds weren't a thing you saw that much anymore, not with so many people away at boot camp or working 12-hour shifts, so I was curious. I pressed in through the crowd, trying to see what they were looking at, and when I saw what it was, I gasped.

My father was in the middle of the park, doing a puppet show of Otesanek. There were three young boys with him, who'd watched his shows when he hosted them at school, helping him hold up some of the puppets, and one was even providing some of the voices. My father had the biggest smile on his face as he worked, and it only got bigger when he saw me. Even before the war he'd never had a crowd that big, nowhere _near_.

After that day... I don't know if I only noticed it after that, or if it really started after that day, but it felt like a dam breaking. Every day, it seemed, there was someone doing a reenactment of a play in the park, or a few musicians would set up to play classic songs, or someone would bring a projector and play an old movie. And the crowds would always be _massive_. I don't know if they ever got permits for it, or if either they or the government actually cared.

It wasn't just the park. I saw more and more street art each day, the radio got livelier, and the internet seemed to explode with home movies and entertainment.

It was as my father said. Sometimes, we just need the littlest things will give us hope that everything will be alright.

-/-\\-

**_You have been reading:_ **

**_Worldfall, Chapter Two: The Long Wait_ **


	3. Arrival

**Singh I**

_It takes about an hour's drive north of Amritsar, holiest city in the region of Punjab, to reach my next subject's house. Though Punjab has retained its reputation as the breadbasket of the Indian subcontinent, much of its farmland has been reclaimed by nature, in what has been poetically described as the "once and future wilderness"._

_Gurpreet Singh's small home resides in the heart of this reclaimed land. Having retreated from the public eye after the war, the former head of the Indian Space Research Organization spends his days writing papers and reading scripture. His husband, Venkatappa Ravichandran, greets me at the door and ushers me into Dr. Singh's office. My impression of the man is an imposing barrel-chested figure with a bone-white beard, looking more like a fearsome warrior of old than a doctor of aerospace engineering. He shakes my hand firmly, and gestures for me to sit in his seat, as he prefers to stand and pace while talking._

A: I enjoyed your articles on the HESTIA project- good shakedown of it. It betrays a mind who knows what they're talking about.

**Q: Thank you, Doctor. Now then, I would like to ask about the environment that birthed the Hanuman project.**

A: Ah, now _that_ was a fairly unique environment. A time of boundless curiosity, unbridled confusion, and unparalleled dread. First contact had been made with two different civilizations in two months, and odds were that both of them had hostile intent. I won't go into the panic at the time, as I feel I am not the most knowledgeable witness, and I am sure there are others who can describe it far better. Suffice to say, not only was society at large thrown into upheaval, but so was my line of work. Anyone with working knowledge of spaceflight technology or military matters knew that our satellites would be the first victims of the war.

Satellites had been around for fewer than sixty years by that point in time, and yet they had already become an integral part of life. Mapping, navigation, weather predictions that helped to save lives and to save crops, _communication_ , oh how much of the world relied on satellites to convey the vast amounts of information we produced. These were vital, and so very vulnerable. So vulnerable, in fact, that some nations began to wonder if they should cut the cords themselves, so to speak.

**Q: As in reducing reliance on satellites?**

A: As in cutting out their eyes and ears to preserve their senses, if you ask me. I knew it would be foolish to try and remove something of such great importance simply because it was vulnerable, but my own nation felt the risk was too great. They argued that effectively protecting them was impossible, and that they should instead rely on the American plan of microsatellites to preserve the most vital functions of communication and navigation.

_He pauses to shake his head._

I had to destroy many projects the engineers under my supervision had developed. We had spent years making a space-based telescope called ASTROSAT, due to launch about eleven months after the Discovery, and it was left to gather dust. Gradually, we were forced to cut off communications with our deep space probes, either focusing the equipment on listening to the Conquest Fleet or just "saving resources". One of them, the Mars Orbiter, had only been launched a year before, and already it had to die. Tragic wastes, all of it.

All around me, the world was receding from the heavens. The International Space Station was abandoned and eventually deliberately deorbited, America abandoned its Orion project- er, the _other_ Orion project, mind you, I'm speaking of capsule spacecraft, and the Russians mothballed the Soyuz. The Soyuz was a workhorse type of spacecraft that had quite literally outlived the nation that birthed it, and seeing it die made me fear for the future. I thought, even if we did survive the war, we would stay closed in, fearful of the stars. I felt I had to do something to help keep the dream alive.

**Q: And so Hanuman was born?**

A: Yes. Even before so many projects were abandoned I had wanted to send a probe to fly by the Fleet, as who wouldn't? Who wouldn't want to see up close a fleet of alien spacecraft, possessing technology you had only dreamed of beforehand? My desire to see the project through only intensified when I felt that it would help preserve the world's desire to explore the stars. Thankfully, my superiors approved the project with surprising swiftness, though their reasoning was based more in politics and the wartime preparations. It was why it received the name it did.

**Q: After the monkey warrior god of Hindu scripture?**

A: One of his most memorable exploits was when he was sent as a scout to the island of Lanka and almost quite literally lit a fire under the seat of its demon king. My country's leadership argued that it would do the same to the Conquest Fleet, by demonstrating our ability to reach and observe them, and it would simultaneously demonstrate our initiative and technological prowess to our allies.

We were set to work immediately, with a deadline set for late 2016, as that would be when Mars would be in an ideal position for the probe to swing around for a gravity boost and fly towards the Fleet. Two years is alarmingly short time to prepare a probe for launch, mind you, as we also had to perform safety tests and design an ideal probe. This would be a different manner of beast from our previous work, as instead of searching for potential Martian aquifers or engaging in spectrographic analysis of Jupiter's atmosphere, it would have to examine small details on spacecraft within a very short time frame.

**Q: How short?**

A: Altogether? Approximately nine minutes. Up close? About eighty milliseconds. And that's assuming they wouldn't destroy the probe like the Fithp had done to Cassini.

**Q: You only had that much time to observe the Fleet?**

A: Well, that was mostly because of how fast the Fleet would be traveling- they had decelerated quite considerably as they passed the Oort cloud, but by the scheduled flyby time they would still be moving faster than any human spacecraft. Such challenges brought about new innovations. We actually forwent on some of the usual equipment found on spacecraft to ensure more space for the camera systems, as ultimately it _was_ meant to see the Fleet up close. It was essentially little more than a massive cluster of cameras of varying focal lengths and shutter speeds, with everything else either supporting said cameras or ensuring the information returned to Earth. Spectrographic work could be handled from terrestrial observatories.

The engineering was difficult, but there was also the resistance from other nations when the project became public.

**Q: What sort of resistance?**

A: Some were worried that it could be seen as aggressive. After all, we _technically_ didn't know for sure that the Conquest Fleet was hostile, and some worried that the probe may cause hostilities. What if our aim was off, and the probe accidentally smashed right into a starship? A few groups went in the other direction, and asked why we hadn't turned it into essentially a massive fletchette bomb that would send shrapnel into the Fleet.

To those two arguments, my rebuttals are plenty. A peaceful race would know that a mere probe would not be a weapon, and would be quite forgiving of our curiosity. And the starships were still beyond the Kuiper Belt when we launched- I would have better luck hitting an apple off someone's head from the Moon than we would hitting a starship. On the other side, the fact that we weren't _technically_ at war meant that it would be ill-advised to act so aggressively and potentially start a preventable war. And even if we _had_ done the shrapnel idea, those photon rockets are so powerful that they likely would have ablated most of the shrapnel away.

Eventually, we won out, and the mission proceeded as planned.

**Q: I'm surprised other nations didn't attempt their own flyby missions.**

A: The Americans were pouring their spaceflight resources to the microsatellite program, making tens of thousands of fist-sized satellites that would be much harder to find and destroy, and to ensure such small satellites could provide vital functions required massive undertakings in developing laser communications and the like. And besides, quite a few scientists disappeared off the grid for projects we knew nothing about. The Chinese attempted a flyby mission, as I now know, but after some poor technician tripped and damaged the reflector of their main camera, the mission had to be scrubbed due to the missed window.

I remember the bated breath I released when Hanuman survived the ascent to orbit, the next when it successfully left Earth for the Mars flyby, the one after when it flew past Mars, until...

_He holds his hands wide._

The Fleet.

The images were haunting- I imagine you've seen them. The bright distant lights giving way to silver gourds upon pillars of eternity. It was a resounding success in many ways, for its survival and many images captured indicated that they lacked even point-defense weapons, which was a relief after the terror of _Thuktun Flishithy_ 's nightmarish armaments. It revealed the massive fuel supplies and the collimated mirrors they used to achieve their starflight, providing new insights into how we could one day achieve the same.

But most of all, it was a success in that it revived the dream. I saw many news articles of how it was a sign that the aliens' supremacy of space was not absolute, and that one day after the war we may supplant it. But I do not appreciate such egotistical statements. I appreciated how many projects went from "canceled" to "delayed".

And, though I am not one to give into ego, it is a sacred duty of mine as _khalsa_ to oppose tyranny, whether it be from this green Earth or from light years distant.

_A faint proud smile crosses his lips._

Against tyranny of such scope and depth, meant to crush all that we love under its heel, something as simple as reaching them with a humble probe can be a grand gesture.

-/-\\-

**Paulson II**

_Accessing her computer, Paulson pulls up a hologram of an astronomical plate, showing a neat grid of bright lights, fifty by fifty._

A: You have to admire how effectively the ships manage to stay in formation across so many light years, coordinating trajectories and accelerations. They've turned interstellar travel into clockwork. 

**Q: How far away was the Fleet when this plate was taken?**

A: Still farther away than the orbit of Neptune, but that's the thing about photon rockets- just to provide meager acceleration they have to be able to produce a nightmarish amount of power, making them painfully visible. That grid you see is about the same area as Texas.

That same brightness meant that actually observing the ships themselves was not really an option- even though we had telescopes capable of filtering out great deals of light, such as when we observe the Sun, the collimating mirrors they use around the actual emitter means that all we saw were great hemispheres for quite some time. After a while, when they were getting closer, the light was so bright that it would cast faint shadows at night. We advised people to take caution and not look directly at the emitters, since there was potential risk for eye damage, but I bet the first wartime casualties were from the dumbasses who kept on staring.

**Q: When did the emitters turn off?**

A: About a week before they arrived. I remember my sister telling me about how my niece was all confused as to where some of the stars went. We weren't surprised, since actual orbital maneuvering would be really difficult and excessively expensive with photon rockets, and it gave us the opportunity to study them in depth, instead of that faster-than-a-blink encounter the Indian probe had. We'd already known about a lot of what we saw from the probe- the bulbous fuel tanks with pockmarked debris shields, the glowing radiators between the ships proper and the photon rockets, and the like, but now we could better look at them.

It's probably easier to list the observatories that _weren't_ looking at the Fleet during that time. Conventional ones, radio telescopes, infrared, the works. We wanted every last juicy detail we could our hands on before they landed, and that meant trying to figure out the purpose of every small bit that stuck out. Were those protuberances cameras, or were they laser emitters? Could we determine what kind of fuel they had in the tanks? Could we use the heat blooms across the hull to determine the ship's layout, or at least the location of its power source?

We still had so many crazy theories as to what sort of capabilities they had- we were afraid we were going to see evidence of antimatter stored aboard, or force fields like out of science fiction, or materials being used that we couldn't even begin to figure out how they made it. I remember a Chinese story where aliens figured out how to apply the strong nuclear force to materials, making them literally indestructible to whatever we had, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit we we worried they could have something like that.

It was fascinating, watching them. Despite still being millions of miles away, they were approaching fast, and their size meant that we could get some fairly detailed observations. I'd never thought the day would come where I could look into a telescope and just see an alien spacecraft.

I still remember the panic when they swung around Earth. The way people were acting, almost like the initial stuff with the Discovery, you'd have thought that they were already landing. The US actually primed the railgun network, if memory serves, just in case they actually did try to land at the time. But they got no closer than three thousand kilometers from Earth, since what they were actually doing was a gravity assist, looping around to bleed off velocity and enter orbit around the Moon. Still, three thousand kilometers is close enough that people could see the Fleet with the naked eye. A good pair of binoculars would let you actually see some of the bigger details, back then.

_She shivers._

Woof, I still think about that time. It felt like a shark swimming around you, looking for the best moment to strike.

**Q: That was when they detached the photon rockets, yes?**

A: About two hours after entering lunar orbit, yes. That was another thing that astonished us- it was hard enough to imagine a photon rocket effective enough to bring you to half the speed of light, but to also have it be a modular piece you can take off at will? It was almost like they were mocking us, showing off just how advanced their spaceflight technology was. I mean, it also made sense, because it indicated that they were going to use a different type of engine to actually engage in orbital maneuvering and landing.

It felt like everyone was holding in a breath when they settled into orbit around the Moon. What did this mean? Were they going to open up a dialogue? Preparing to settle the Moon instead? Or were they watching us, getting ready to make their landings and conquer us? They'd already sort of conquered the Moon, since that's _our_ Moon and they had complete supremacy over it, and I know people at the time acted like that was the first proof of their intent.

Me? All I did was continue watching them here, going through mug after mug of coffee, holding only a faint consolation to my chest like it was keeping me warm.

**Q: Which was?**

A: That the spectrographic work indicated that they used carbon, iron, titanium, and other elements in their hull compositions. _Mundane_ elements, likely with mundane chemical compositions. This wasn't something "outside the periodic table" like so many stupid sci fi stories like to throw around, or some material so far out it might as well be the unholy mother of adamantium and mithril. They used _metal_ , metal that could get _tarnished_ and _pockmarked_. 

They were advanced, without a doubt, but they ultimately cut from the same cloth as us. And if there's that kind of common ground, then perhaps we stood a chance.

-/-\\-

**Wallafess I**

_My next interview subject schedules our rendezvous at a small park near the Salt Lake Race Free Zone, so small that it is essentially a bench surrounded by some trees, in turn sandwiched between a bakery and a library. I wait sitting on the bench for some time; after half an hour, I begin to worry that I had read the e-mail wrong, or perhaps my subject has changed his mind._

_I am about to make a phone call when my subject arrives, in a most unconventional method of transportation. A particularly large and somewhat pudgy beffel trots towards me, dragging a heavily-customized Radio Flyer wagon behind it. Sitting in the wagon with a large blanket about his form is Wallafess, a Rabotev troopmale. Not quite middle-aged by Rabotev standards, his scales are still smooth and flush against each other, though I note both a scar on his snout and a distinct lack of body paint._

A: Get in, loser, we're going fishing. _Hisses in mirth._

_I oblige him, pausing to let the beffel sniff my hand as I sit in the wagon behind Wallafess. The troopmale dangles a carrot in front of the beffel, and it resumes its trot once again, squeaking excitedly. Wallafess cranes one of his eye stalks back to look at me, keeping the other on the sidewalk._

**Q: Thank you for your time. I know that many troopmales are tight-lipped about their experiences in the war.**

A: Eh, it's nothing really. I think openness is the best way to process what happened to us, and to you. Keeping your memories and feelings in is like trying to keep in a piss so bad you rupture your bladder. Besides, Mamta said good things about your work, so I know I'm not speaking to some shitty tabloid writer who wants to twist my words into something really stupid. You know how many of us have been hounded by "journalists" who want to trick us into saying we kidnapped Elvis?

_He lets out a low hiss, his species' equivalent of a sigh._

Anyway, ask away.

**Q: I was hoping to ask you about your experiences when you first arrived in the solar system, before landing.**

A: I think if you want to really understand that, you need to understand our mindset going in. Have to know what something looks like before it broke to see where the cracks formed, right?

I might be Rabotev, but I was born on Home, like most others in the Fleet. I've never even been to Rabotev, only read about it in history books, saw movies made there... if that human God really makes life from clay, then my clay is from Home and Home only. The only time I'd ever felt like I was different was when my teacher was teaching us about the Conquests in fifth school year, and she said "We first conquered the Rabotevs, like Walla over there". It messed with me a little, almost like an out of body experience, but I kinda glossed it over before I came here.

Anyway... the thing about Home is the _quiet_. Everything about that world is quiet. The weather is stable, since there's no tilt and none of those massive oceans this planet has- the only time weather could be a problem is during the rainy week, when most of the planet gets a superbloom and there's pollen in your Emperor-forsaken cloaca. Every day is hot and dry, every night is cool and dry. Wildlife? We didn't destroy our environment like you guys were doing, but Home doesn't have a lot of wildlife naturally, and they had long evolved to ignore us.

But most of all, the _people_ are quiet. Last time we had a murder was about the same time some human emperor was like "Know what? I wanna be buried in a giant sand triangle." There's no serious crime there, no corruption, no squalor or locked doors. If my car engine died anywhere on Home, I could just knock on the door -any door- and explain what happened, and the person living there would let me sit in their living room while towing services arrived. We grow up in complete peace, so complete you don't really think of it as peace, because that would mean thinking about the other thing.

For a lot of humans, Home would be paradise. And you know what? Paradise could be _so boring_.

**Q: Were you bored?**

A: Oh yeah. So many of us were. People on Home find their ways of alleviating it. Technically we only had to work ten hours a week, but you'd get the ones who'd find that their work was their passion, and they'd throw themselves into it. Chefs, teachers, bookstore owners... other ways were hobbies. Even if you were shit at them, it was a good way of feeling like you had a purpose, you know? Home's full of wannabe writers, painters, theatrical actors, and everything else.

Another big way was travel, but that had limits. Home's been united so long that it's become really homogenous- you can "do Home" in about one of your months if you ask me. I know a popular thing to do was to recreate the Journey of Sherran-

**Q: Sherran?**

_Both of his eye stalks flick to me, then wiggle wildly._

A: What?! You're a big name journalist and you've never heard about Sherran from one of us? Sherran the Explorer? She's like your Magellan, Columbus, Peary, and Addie-whatever all rolled into one, minus the genocide. She was the first one to ever circumnavigate Home, before it was even unified. Even by our standards her expedition's fucking old. She was trekking around the globe before your species even left Africa, like a hundred thousand of your years ago or something. Everyone heard the story growing up, of how when she was barely past puberty when she decided to hop in a little wooden cart and had her beffel Climber carry her across the world. This was back when the wildlife hadn't learned to not eat us, too, when we didn't know what routes were safe.

The beffel was actually a smart move. Azwaca get too skittish around predators, since a lone azwaca might as well have a dinner bell around its neck, and they don't climb well. But the beffel's a bit too mean to run away when something's trying to eat it, _especially_ tsiongi, and its squeaking alerts the owner. That's make or break when you're in the wilds of ancient Home.

So yeah, she's a big deal, and naturally everyone wants to recreate the great adventure. Some archaeologist found dried up seeds of an extinct cultivar of fruit she loved to eat , and eventually traced her exact paths. One of the early Emperors who loved the story decided to have the paths made into a road, so everyone could do it.

No one recreates the entire journey, of course. She went _everywhere_. Around the equator, from North Pole to South, around each sea... so naturally she literally died of old age three days after returning to her old home. Probably went home because she knew it was time.

I did it a little, once. But honestly, it was almost as boring as everything else I had been doing. Not just because it was a cozy stone path with no wild animals, but because it was just following in someone else's footsteps. I didn't just want to go somewhere I hadn't been before- I wanted to go somewhere _no one_ had ever been before. Because doing that makes you feel like you did something _important_ , something that gives your life meaning.

 **Q: Would you say that the troopmales who signed up during the Soldier's Time were interested in adventure?**  
  
A: More or less. Yes. Definitely; all of us _chose_ to sign up. Growing up, we knew about Earth, or Tosev Three as they called it. We were taught about your species, about how this world belonged to the Race, and how when we were adults we might be able to go there and bring the people there into the fold of the Emperor. We saw pictures of a blue world- not reds and browns and yellows, but _blue_! That used to fill my dreams as a kid, you know? A blue world, covered in such alien things as _ice_ and _snow_ and massive fields of plants as tall as buildings. Blue, blue...

We had a once in a millennia opportunity to see a world never before visited by our kind, and encounter strange new things. We were embarking on one of our people's three biggest expeditions _ever_ , and we were going to expand the Empire for the Emperor. So, we signed up, because we figured that would be better than becoming scholars or working at food-packing factories. Only highly-trained specialists or competent government officials get to go to other worlds in peacetime, when there's projected shortages of certain workers' fields.

 **Q: I have to admit, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect.**  
  
A: How so?  
  
**Q: You grew up in such a peaceful environment, yet you were willing to go to war against an entire _planet_?**  
  
A: To be honest, I never expected I'd actually have to _kill_ a human. None of my friends expected it either. We thought we'd just come in, show off our fancy guns, and have the planet under control in a month. I mean, I knew that the previous conquests had deaths in the thousands altogether, but everyone thinks that they're not going to be it, that they're not going to be the ones who slaughter them. Or get slaughtered. We knew that a few dozen of us were probably going to die, but we brushed it off. We all thought 'won't be me'.

I still remember that day, when I was woken up from those decades of coldsleep. It feels like waking up from a really bad hangover, to be honest. Dry mouth, sensitive eyes, weird-feeling muscle cramps because you haven't even swiveled an eye turret in about forty-five years -our years- and simultaneously wanting to vomit and eat an entire azwaca. Had a technician just as dried out as me float in my face, do a quick check up, then tell me to get to the mess hall while he did everyone else in my row.

I knew we'd arrived because we were weightless- while you can simulate gravity by spinning a starship, that's only when you're in orbit for long periods of time, because it's a hassle to rearrange all the heavy equipment. We'd finished decelerating, which meant we were finally there, at the beautiful blue world.

Man, you should've seen my face when I finally managed to find a porthole after my first meal in years, and all I saw was bare grey rock.

**Q: You mean you saw the Moon.**

A: Yeah, and I _shouldn't_ have been seeing the moon. Lunar orbital insertion was meant for dropping off the photon rockets, the actual light projectors and their massive mirrors- they're great for interstellar travel since nothing has better exhaust velocity than light, but the acceleration is piddly, terrible for orbital maneuvering and literally unworkable for landing. The mirrors are so delicate than even putting them in a medium range orbit around a planet with atmosphere is bad juju, what with all the few molecules per cubic centimeter or whatever.

 _We_ , the troopmales, weren't supposed to be awake for that part. We were only supposed to be out of the tubes about five days after arriving in orbit around Earth itself, once the ships' crews did all the proper surveying and putting out the satellites.

**Q: Satellites?**

A: You know, to check on the weather, track troop movements, and the like. I know using satellites to spy on fucking Mongols would've been overkill, but that's Race doctrine for you. When you go to war, you prepare for war.

Anyway, seeing the Moon -huge moon, by the way- made me and the other troopmales realize something was off. They deliberately woke us up early, but why?

**Q: When were you briefed on the situation?**

A: After we took inventory of our supplies and made sure we had all of our equipment and personal affects. That was a bit before "nighttime" for us. We were split up into a few sections, each in the biggest chambers of the ship. I was in the mess hall, which meant I got the luxury of being debriefed by the Shiplord, Npitt. Of course, by "debriefed", I mean that he held up a holoprojector and let a recording of Fleetlord Atvar do the talking.

When he said that "the Tosevite situation has developed in a way not beneficial to conquest", I thought he was going to say something like you guys had gone extinct, or you had some sort of plague ravaging you and we were going to have to be careful. Instead, he just bluntly said "Tosev Three has rapidly become industrialized" and that were were going to undergo some last-minute briefings and training.

**Q: What sort of training?**

A: He didn't tell us. By the Emperor, he didn't even elaborate on "industrialized". Apparently the higher-ups decided against showing us the contact packages for fear of "morale problems". We had no idea what your society looked like, or how it acted, or what weapons you guys were packing.  
  
That ended up being all my friends and I talked about. Tosevites this, Tosevites that. Rumors started flying. "The Tosevites have more advanced technology than us; that can be the only reason why we haven't been told anything." "Another species has conquered Tosev Three, and is denying us the right to colonize." "The Tosevites are going to send a ship to greet us".  
  
I didn't buy any of it, but I still had a few sleepless nights, thinking about what _actually_ was happening. I'm trying to think of an analogy for you, to understand our panic. Imagine... imagine if you decided to go to Africa, right now, for a safari trip. Maybe you'll see the chimps, since they look pretty clever, and you might wryly think that they could become like you in a million years. But as soon as you arrive at the airport, the tour guide comes up to you all white-faced and is like "My god, the chimps... they've _advanced._ " Wouldn't you be terrified?  
  
**Q: Perhaps.**  
  
A: We were! We had no idea what he meant by "industrialized". Did that mean they just had, like, fucking mills making clothes or something? Guns? Explosive metal bombs? The idea of you guys advancing at all was hard for us to swallow- I honestly think we'd have accepted you guys randomly growing wings better than that.

I remember, that "night", I got to float over to a porthole with my friend Rastin, who had a small telescope in his personal effects. Command had good luck, and at the time I thought I did as well.

**Q: Why?**

A: Because Earth was at the "full" phase from the Moon's perspective, which meant I couldn't see the nightside. Which meant I, or anyone else who had the same idea, would've seen the Emperor-forsaken city lights lighting up the entire fucking planet. It's probably why they put the micrometeoroid shields over the windows later on.

But for unaware Wallafess, it meant I could see the planet really well. Rastin and I spent a good hour gazing at your blue world, soaking in the sight of those massive oceans and puffy white clouds. We chatted for a bit, wondering what part we'd land on. He wanted the big desert, since that sounded comfy, but as for me I wanted to land somewhere green.

_The beffel arrives at an intersection, and Wallafess gets it to stop by feeding it the carrot. When the crosswalk light turns green, he produces another one and the beffel continues pulling us along._

You know, I'd crossed so many light years to get there, the distance from Earth to your massive moon might as well have been a scale-gap away. And yet, it felt farther away then when I'd first set out.

-/-\\-

**Perkins I**

_Humberto Perkins is one of the younger individuals to be interviewed- as of the time of this publication, he is only twenty seven years old. He greets me at the Mississippi Memorial Park, located in the new capital of Endurance. It is many of identical Memorial Parks scattered across the planet, all with the same centerpiece: a brass globe of the Earth twenty feet across, with the names of all known victims of the war in the region etched into the surface.  
When I arrive at the park, he is calmly studying the globe with a magnifying glass, reading the various names listed. He waves me over, and the review begins._  
  
**Q: Thank you for your time, Mr. Perkins. It is rare to find a unique perspective like yours, of someone who was raised into a post-discovery world, and yet old enough to remember life before the war.**  
  
A: No problem, man. When I heard you were doing this interview, I kinda leapt at the chance. It's not every day I get to talk about my weird childhood.  
  
**Q: Unique is a better word. Now, let's start at the beginning. What was life like for you, before the war?**  
  
A: Well, my mom and aunt raised me, along with my older sister. My mom worked a deli, and my aunt was a waitress. At least, that was before the ships were discovered; I actually don't remember that time. Earliest I recall, it was already a year into getting ready for the war. Kelly -uh, my sister- she enlisted in the Air Force, and my aunt ended up getting a job at a weapons factory instead of waitressing.  
  
It's kinda weird, growing up in a place that's preparing for a war. Especially with how curious we are as kids. I remember asking my mom what Aunt Callie did at the factory all the time, and she just said "to keep you safe". I didn't know what she meant by that.  
  
In kindergarten, I remember having to do annoying drills in school, along with the fire alarm stuff. It'd just be a normal day at school, then suddenly some bell would start ringing, and the teacher would get up and say "The aliens are coming, kids. Stay together and follow me to the shelter." Then we'd spend half an hour learning how to put on a gas mask, or how to call for help in case one of us got sick or hurt. There was this blonde girl who sat next to me in kindergarten who would always volunteer to be the "injured kid", and if I got picked she'd try to tell me I needed to give her "mouse-to-mouse".

_He shakes his head, laughing._

I didn't want those cooties, man!   
  
Military guys would come in pretty often, too. Thank Christ we weren't like some other countries where they were willing to teach us how to hold a gun or something, but they'd talk to us about how they were going to protect us from "the aliens". One poor guy actually left the seminar early though, after one of my classmates asked him all excited "Are we gonna fight the aliens too, mister?" Looking back, the sunglasses were probably so we wouldn't see him tearing up a little. But you didn't really think about that kind of stuff when you're not even in middle school yet.

I remember being so stoked when my sister got picked to be the one who talked to us in class. It was like a crossover episode, seeing my family in the school. At home- _when_ she was home- this girl would crying her eyes out watching K-dramas while eating cereal on the couch in her boxers, and then when she had the uniform on she was a completely different person. Hair tied back and smooth, serious look, everything. She sold it pretty well to little me, but I know she hated pretending to be that kind of person.

I also remember asking what an alien _was_. This wasn't like before, when they used to put aliens in kids' cartoons or on cereal boxes. I guess the government was afraid of confusing children about the actual dangers, so they _encouraged_ media to take that kind of stuff off the air, or move it to hours where kids weren't awake. Nothing in the cartoons, or movies... I didn't get to see E.T until I was like fifteen. I'd never actually realized the _concept_ of aliens before school started.  
  
Me and my friends would tell each other things about the aliens after school, trying to convince each other that we _totally_ knew what an alien was. Cozzy said they were "commies", according to his pa. Mini thought they were like gators, but they flew about with bird wings, which was why the teachers told us to keep an eye on the skies if the bell rang.  
  
After a while, though, I slowly began to learn the truth. My mom told me that the aliens were like people, but from another planet like Mars, and that they wanted to talk our homes from us. I had no idea why someone from Mars would want my shitheap of a house, but I didn't ask too much about it.  
  
Then the teachers started pulling up informational videos about what aliens were, and why we had to do the drills. They used designs based off the pictures that Indian probe took instead of UFOs when telling us what to look out for, and they even taught us a few words and phrases in Race-tongue, but we still didn't know what they looked like. I remember having nightmares about them, and each time they looked like whatever else scared me at the time. Sometimes they looked like gators, like Mini said, and sometimes they looked like spiders. One time, they looked like Miss Rogers, that old bitch.  
  
My mom used to hold me when I woke up crying, and said that it was going to be alright. Kelly was going to whomp their butts in her plane, and we'd be fine.

**Q: What was it like when the Conquest Fleet arrived?**

A: At first, I was actually stoked! It was like late into first grade, and when the Fleet was about to swing around the world they sent us home early, and canceled classes for the rest of the school year. Me and my buddies were getting all excited, thinking of all the stuff we could do with the time off, but that went nowhere, 'cause the first thing that happened when I got home was my mom telling me I couldn't leave the house. She didn't even want me out in the tiny front yard, she was that worried.

I mean, at the time we had no idea if they were gonna land right there and then, but I think my mom was more worried about how people were reacting. Before the war, Mississippi was not a good place for people like me, and nothing scared people like my mom more than when white folk are freaking out in the streets.

Aunt Cassie came home that night, and she had a pair of binoculars with her so we could see the Fleet in the sky. We didn't have the best look, since they were a bit farther away already, and it's hard to keep trained on something like that with only binoculars, but I still got to see the big mirrors they used. Pretty cool stuff when you're a kid.

I ended up sleeping in my mom's bed that night, sandwiched between her and Aunt Cassie.

**Q: Because you were scared?**

A: No, my mom was. She did a good job of hiding it, but even as a kid I knew something was up. For the next few days, it was real quiet in the house. Mom wouldn't let me out of her sight unless I was going to the bathroom. She'd make me breakfast, then camp us out in the living room. She gave me some crayons, paper, a few of the toys that were still around, and that'd keep me distracted while she watched the news, guzzling coffee by the pot.

**Q: Did you pick up anything from the news at the time?**

A: Nah, the news might as well be Greek when you're six- too boring! I'd only pick up stuff when mom told me. "The aliens are visiting the moon for a while, sweetie, but we don't know if they're coming yet." "We're going to talk to the aliens now, sweetie, and maybe we'll play nice."

It was only watching her get all haggard, with bags under her eyes, that I was getting scared. Parents are like Superman when you're little, you know? They know exactly what to do, and when you're with them you're untouchable. Parents punch out monsters in the closet, fix the big questions of the universe for you, all that. So when she's all scared...

By the fifth or sixth day, before Landing Day, I wasn't minding having to share a hot-ass bed between mom and Aunt Cassie.

-/-\\-

**Dimayuga I**

_Six centimeters below the average height for women in her country, Victoria Dimayuga is easy to miss in a crowd, especially one as large as downtown rush hour in Manila. She eventually waves me down, and we sit down on a bench to hold the interview._

**Q: Thank you for your time.**

A: No problem, though I'm in a bit of a rush, so let's get into it.

**Q: I can do that. How was it that you became the official UN translator for the first attempt at diplomacy with the Race?**

A: Well, I'm not a linguist- I wasn't involved in the actual cracking of Race-tongue, but I _was_ in the first wave of people who was taught how to speak it, since I was already a long-established interpreter at the UN, who could already speak English, Spanish, Filipino, and Kankankaey. You know those moments in the news or in old documentary footage where a representative touches their headphones? Odds are it's me or one of my fellow interpreters talking in their ear. My bosses figured it would be good to have interpreters who could speak Race-tongue for whatever talks we had.

**Q: I thought it had been near-unanimously decided that the Conquest Fleet had hostile intent?**

A: 'Near-unanimous' is infinitely far away from 'unanimous'. We were fairly certain, but for all we knew they might have been a massive colonization fleet that had no idea of us, or maybe they took one look at us and decided to throw in the towel. Trying to negotiate things wouldn't hurt, and worst-case scenario... if we had to negotiate a surrender, interpreters would help us keep every shred we could.

**Q: Of all the other translators, was there any reason why you in particular was selected?**

A: Why yes, actually. I proved a pretty quick learner- I picked up the basic grammar of it in about two weeks, and passed the class in another ten. But plenty of others did well in those classes. What really decided it was my accent.

**Q: Your accent?**

A: More like lack thereof. Phonology is important when you're speaking a language, especially ones where slightly different consonants or tones can lead to really different meanings. I've seen it and experienced it, where someone technically has a good grasp on the grammar and vocab, but their accent is so absurdly thick that you have trouble understanding it. A favorite example of mine was that this comic book writer I really liked growing up had such a thick Scottish accent that his Italian interpreter needed _another_ interpreter.

With a language whose speakers don't even have the same _vocal organs_ , being able to mimic the accent is very important, especially when you're representing your entire species in its first every discussion with a potentially hostile alien armada. It's also _really_ hard. You can see it in the body language of Race males when someone's talking to them in really slurred Race-tongue and they're too polite to ask for clarification.

Many of my fellow interpreters spoke intelligible Race-tongue, but there was no way you'd ever hear them and think they're actually one of those lizards. A few got close, and apparently my superiors thought I was closest, so I was selected.

So it was off to Geneva, about a day before they swung around Earth and gave us our first collective heart attack. They'd already been around the Moon for a few days before we decided to formally contact them.

**Q: Why was the attempt so late?**

A: Well, we didn't talk to them while they were out beyond the Moon because of light-speed lag, since that'd be _really_ tedious, and I guess there were worries of signal degradation? I dunno. And we waited a few days after they arrived probably because we hoped they'd open communications first. But they didn't -what a _surprise_ \- and so we decided to risk it.

I still remember how nerve-wracking it was, standing at the computer station they'd set up in the middle of the Special Assembly... I still don't know why they made me sit in the middle like that. It wasn't like _I_ was the one trying to take over Earth. I saw everyone looking at me- representatives from every country, including ones who weren't normally a part of the UN, world leaders, my fellow interpreters, and probably billions of people1. Yeah, I'm not normally that pale, if you ever see me in the old videos.

Then the radio turned on, signaling me to begin, and suddenly I couldn't see their eyes on me.

1 It is estimated that approximately five billion people watched the UN's dialog with the Race Conquest Fleet, whether on the internet, television, or by tuning in to the radio.

-/-\\-

**Audio Transcript - Transmission from UN to Race Conquest Fleet. May 28th, 2020.**

**Note: All terms that were unknown to the receiving party at the time will be underlined.**

_Initial transmission is sent to the Conquest Fleetin lunar orbit at 12:00 PM, Greenwich Time._  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "This a transmission to the fleet in lunar orbit, sent from the United Nations Special Assembly. Repeat, this is a transmission to the fleet-"  
  
_Sixteen seconds of static pass, during which there is an unintelligible conversation on the Fleet's end._  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "This is Kirel, Shiplord of the _127th Emperor Hetto, _bannership of the Conquest Fleet, as decreed by the 42nd Emperor Risson. How is it that you know the language of the Race?"  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "We have studied your language for five of our years. We have been listening to radio transmissions broadcasted between the ships in your fleet."  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "What is the purpose of this transmission?"  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "We desire a dialog with the one in charge of your fleet."  
  
_Another minute of static passes with an unintelligible conversation from the **Hetto**._  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "This is Atvar, Exalted Fleetlord of the Conquest Fleet, as decreed by the 42nd Emperor Risson. It is... excellent... to see that you have already begun to civilize yourselves by speaking our language. Will you surrender peacefully to the Race?"  
  
_The Special Assembly waits one minute before a reply, during which there is a short but furious discussion amongst the Security Council as to how the reply shall be worded._  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "The 197 sovereign nations of Earth have unanimously rejected the offer of surrender, as sent by the Fleetlord."  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "You Tosevites have clearly shown yourselves to be relatively civilized and intelligent. It would be unwise to reject our most gracious offer of a peaceful surrender and suffer a conquest that will result in great loss of life and widespread destruction for your world."  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "The Special Assembly refuses be intimidated by threats of violence. The success of your conquest is far from guaranteed- we have spent years preparing for an... anti-conquest of unprecedented scale."  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "Unprecedented scale? It is evident that you Tosevites know little of us, if you believe the actions within the atmosphere of a lone world are of immense scale to us. We have conquered two planets before this current expedition, with each world pacified within thirty days. By our estimates, the most recent conquest was approximately five thousand of your years ago. Your species was still only experimenting with primitive agriculture while we were traversing the stars and bringing entire planets into the fold for the Emperor."  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "And now our world is capable of spaceflight itself. We are undoubtedly the most advanced species you have encountered."  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "Your technological development would only make colonization easier. Your own translation of our language has already done half of our civilizing mission for us- your infrastructure would therefore be effectively repurposed. It would, however, _fail_ to keep your world from being absorbed into the Race."  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "The Special Assembly disagrees strongly with your statement. We do not desire war with the Race, and would rather engage in a peaceful exchange of knowledge, culture, and technology. It is the opinion of the Assembly that such an exchange would mutually benefit our worlds. We are currently transmitting the document that details what we would be willing to exchange with the Empire of the Race."  
  
_Ten minutes of static pass._  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "You Tosevites have the audacity to demand access to our spaceflight technology? And for what? Material sciences? Mere documents on biological sciences and physics? And what is this... nanotechnology? What matter of trickery is this?"  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "We are attempting no trickery upon the Empire of the Race. We simply desire a peaceful coexistence, and perhaps a military alliance."

 **[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "A _what_?"

 **[UN Special Assembly]:** "We have had difficulty in finding the translation for the term. It is when two groups engage in joint activity for a common end, while maintaining individual independence."  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "Truly, your species must be egg-addled to create such a concept. For whatever reason would the Race make an _alliance_ with you Tosevites?"  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "The other spacecraft in the solar system is not of our construction, and is evidently not yours. One of our probes in the system was able to discover that the ship is heavily armed, and is likely to attempt a conquest of our planet, much as you so desire. Such an attack, while we are embroiled in war, could spell disaster for both of our worlds."  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "Once again, you are attempting to deceive us by suggesting that we divert our forces to combat a phantom enemy. That spacecraft, _if it exists_ , will have no impact on our conquest, and its creators will fall into the fold as well. If you are truly as concerned by this phantom spacecraft as you claim, then you can provide assistance when you have been absorbed into the Race."  
  
_Twenty seconds of static pass._  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "You call yourselves a Special Assembly, and you use a term we have no word for called _nation_. What is meant by that?"

 **[Un Special Assembly]:** "Nations are large independent groups that govern our people. They are similar to an empire, though few have emperors."

 **[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "Then which of these... not-empires are most powerful on Tosev Three?"  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "That topic has no clout on our current dialog."  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "I disagree. You speak of _alliances_ , and now I shall as well. To the strongest not-empires on Tosev Three, I extend the offer of an _alliance_ : We shall use the full might of the Conquest Fleet to assist you in subduing the rest of the planet. In exchange, our chosen not-empires will be the ruling authorities on Tosev Three, answering only to the Race."  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "The Special Assembly unanimously rejects your offer of an alliance with any member nation. It is no doubt that you would reject such an offer if the roles were reversed."  
  
**[127th Emperor Hetto]:** "The roles are not reversed for a reason. We are the Race! We are the true culture of the universe. and you shall be brought under the rule of the Emperor, as was decreed approximately eight hundred of your years ago. If you do not surrender now, your world shall be brought to heel by force."  
  
**[UN Special Assembly]:** "As all attempts of diplomacy have failed, all 197 members of the United Nations unanimously declare war upon the Empire of the Race. The offer of your surrender will remain open for the time being."  
  
_End transmission._

-/-\\-

**Atvar I**

_My next interviewee is perhaps the most elusive and difficult one to find an audience with. It took two months of paperwork and background screening before I was allowed an appointment. Surprisingly, however, I am allowed to speak with him in person, rather than the phone call I was expecting.  
  
The small state-of-the art building in Geneva, just a street over from the UN Headquarters, is the one of the newest embassies. I am escorted inside by armed guards, taking care to avoid the protestors and counter-protestors that have been flaring up in the past few weeks. Once I am inside, I am patted down once again, then passed through bomb-detecting equipment, which would've safely detonated any explosives smuggled inside my body.  
  
As an old Hallessi guard explains, they've had to replace the blast-shields once before.  
  
Finally, I am allowed into the office of one of the most controversial figures of the 21st Century. It is a small, comfy room, with solid wooden furniture. It seems that Fleetlord Atvar prefers to surround himself with old things, both human and Race-made.  
  
The Fleetlord himself looks very old, despite being what most Race males would describe as "middle-aged". He wordlessly gestures for me to sit, then pours a glass of Race 'brandy', derived from hudipar berry._  
  
**Q: Thank you for allowing this interview, Exalted Fleetlord.**  
  
A: I am unsure of how much clout my title holds, anymore. That is unimportant for the time being, however; my silence has been damning enough, and it is time that truth is wholly revealed at this twilight hour. Ask your questions.  
  
**Q: Very well. Let's start with how you responded to the first signs of Earth's drastic change since the last probe.**  
  
A: I remember that clearly, even through the fog that waking from coldsleep puts over the mind. When you wake from it, it can be hard to remember even your name, and so it took about fifteen minutes before Kirel broke the news to me. However, I had quickly discerned that something troubling must have occured, as it was _Kirel_ who had woken me, instead of the doctors assigned to command crew. While coldsleep is safe enough, we insist on having trained medical professionals available on the slim chance of issue, and so Kirel was breaking protocol.

When he told me that your world had industrialized, I believe that I may have laughed at him. Or perhaps I only thought it was something that should warrant laughing at- my reputation as a dour individual was hatched before the war, and I am first to admit it is not without merit. It was not until the technician he'd dragged with him... Erenwo, was it? It wasn't until he presented the data to me that the fog of coldsleep was truly banished, and cold dread filled my liver like poison.

Why would it not? Tosev Three to me was, when I went into coldsleep, a proto-industrial world that likely did not even have gunpowder1. Time does not pass in coldsleep- in a moment you had become an industrial world, full of countless unknown and terrifying variables. As far as the Race is concerned, those centuries may as well have been a mere moment. A human compatriot once told me that, if you were to make a ratio between your world's recorded history and mine, it would be as though you had encountered a species who had gone from horse to spacecraft in only forty years.

That was what I had to contend with, as I read the data. The success of the expedition, the safety of both the Conquest Fleet and the Colonization Fleet, even the sanctity of Home itself... all had been thrown in jeopardy by this revelation. But I was a Fleetlord of the Race, personally chose by the Emperor, and so I resolved that I would cross this obstacle.

**Q: I am aware that you commissioned your xenopsychologists to study the issue. What led you to that decision?**

A: I had swiftly decided that the first enemy I must vanquish was uncertainty. Our entire developmental method is based around removing "what if" from the equation. By collating all the data we gathered, we could form a clear picture of our foe, and identify the factors behind its development. If we could understand how the Tosevites worked, we could then perhaps find strengths that should be avoided, and weaknesses that could be exploited.

Unfortunately, that picture only grew more grim with each convening of the Shiplords, as we gathered more data on you. You had essentially fulfilled almost every worst-case scenario we had put forward, from gunpowder to advanced communications networks to rudimentary spaceflight. Not only that, but the pointed contact messages, while offering insight into your society, also demonstrated that you were aware of our existence. If you knew of that, than perhaps you knew our intent, and were preparing for war. The human probe that flew past may as well been a gun fired next to our ear.

I know that the probe was the spark that prompted the furious debates.

**Q: What sort of debate?**

A: For the first time, the Shiplords began to debate the goals and nature of our Conquest. The very act of suggesting that the current course, a course helmed by a Fleetlord and chosen by the Emperor, was a bad idea may as well have been mutinous in those early days. The Shiplords were split into multiple camps.

The more conservative males sided with conquest, though they suggested that perhaps we spend ten years studying Tosev Three in orbit in order to determine if we needed to alter our strategy, and how to change it. The moderates were adverse to ten years, feeling that it would only make conquest more difficult, and suggested that we only use the time spent flying to the planet to formulate a more modern battleplan based on the Emperor's unification of Home. I personally was more in line with the moderates- as a Fleetlord, I can neither be overly cautious or as near-mutinous as the radicals.

The radicals themselves were split largely into two parties. One suggested that we simply retreat, tell the Colonization Fleet to turn back, and warn Home. The other party was Straha. He instead swung in the other direction, and stated that we must not flee or conquer Tosev Three, but destroy it altogether with our explosive metal bomb arsenal. Despite being one male, he was one of the loudest parties during that time, arguing that conquest or retreat would simply enable the Tosevites to launch a counterattack.

**Q: And what was your ultimate decision?**

A: I was at a most unpleasant crossroads. Retreat was not simply a matter of shame, though it would be unbearably shameful for all involved, enough to turn the entirety into pariahs- a Conquest is an incredibly resource-intensive endeavor, one that relies on the immense return on investment that comes with securing an entire world. As far as Home would see it, retreating because of _potential_ issues on Tosev Three would be seen as the single greatest mistake in the Race's history, one with appropriate consequences.

However, I knew that pursuing the original plan would be as potentially harmful, even more so. Your civilization may very well be capable of repelling us, I had considered, and if you maintained the rapid development you had demonstrated, you could become advanced enough to threaten Home itself. In that situation, our Conquest would have done nothing but incurred your wrath. Defeat was not simply undesirable, it was unthinkable.

Neither could I simply destroy the planet's biosphere with explosive metal bombs. Denying ourselves an entire world's resources, its workforce, and territory for the Colonization Fleet to settle upon would arguably be as damaging as retreat. This was a point I made countless times to Straha.

And so, I resolved to proceed.

 _He sips his brandy._  
  
When we arrived in orbit around your moon and received radio communications in our tongue, I knew that even a successful conquest would be drenched in blood. Immediately demanding your surrender was a last-ditch attempt on my part, to subvert the bloodshed and peacefully win your world.  
  
I was more fearful than I cared to admit when your United Nations unanimously declared war. There was something about the way it had been said, you see.  
  
**Q: How so?**  
  
A: As far as we were concerned, the Race was the only real culture in the universe. Our laws were the true laws, our form of government the _only_ way. Everyone else were simply collections of savages barely scraping by, not worthy of legal attention. We did not officially declare war on the Rabotevs, or hold a ceremonial surrender when the last of the Hallessi were brought under heel. We simply came and conquered them, refusing to acknowledge what laws or polities they had.  
  
However, the way your world declared war on us, with the ceremony and formality of it... this was not a group of savages we would simply roll over. This was an equal to our own, letting us know of the war that would come.  
  
And so, the war came.  
  
**Q: Would you care to elaborate a little on the invasion plan?**  
  
A: The most basic tenet of warfare is that you must use your strengths to their maximum, and abuse the enemy's weaknesses. That was something I was told time and time again, as I was allowed the rare privilege to study the history of warfare before the unification of Home. Despite the fact I was only expected to encounter small proto-industrial populations limited to muscle-power weaponry, I was educated to fight industrial nations, as that was the conventional wisdom of warfare during the time of unification, and there was no need to change such wisdom to fight sword-swinging barbarians.

During the last three months of our approach, we used our most powerful imaging equipment to study the planet's nightside, as the lights of your cities were visible even from such range. We operated on the assumption that the planet was of relatively even development, and therefore the brightness of the nightside would provide a relatively accurate map of your population distributions. We applied these to climate maps the probes had taken centuries ago, in order to determine what environments you were most comfortable in.

That alone aptly demonstrated your much greater tolerance for the cold, and deep disdain for deserts. I resolved that the fact we would arrive at the beginning of summer would enable us to focus on the Northern Hemisphere while it was still hospitable, minimizing your natural advantage.

The other strengths of Tosev Three, I determined swiftly, would be your large population and industries, from which you could pull worrying amounts of troops and material to use against us. If we were to succeed, we needed to pacify those large populations and either capture or destroy the industrial centers in the beginning of the war.

To do that, I recalled how, in the wars to unify Home, the Emperor once had an explosive metal bomb initiated in the upper atmosphere over Jossano, destroying its electronics via an electromagnetic pulse. It was so effective that the city-state capitulated within the day. Tosev Three's electronics were similarly vulnerable, I imagined. Six such EMB initiations across the planet could help us win the war.

The most crucial advantages the Conquest Fleet would have against Tosev Three, I knew for certain, would be logistics and numbers. Your lack of space infrastructure indicated that you still relied solely on intra-atmospheric transportation to move troops and material, which meant that we could more easily divide armed forces from their supply chains or reinforcements, and deploy our troops to the battlefield more rapidly.

Likewise, we could outnumber Tosevite forces in any given region if need be, should the need for superior numbers become adamant. The revelation that you were divided into nearly two hundred not-empires made it even more promising, as perhaps surrounding not-empires would not attack as we conquered one.

The first landing areas were selected by me personally, as we stayed in orbit around your massive moon. I selected them based no only on matters such as large population, but also proximity to farmland, isolation from other population centers, and proximity to the equatorial regions. On the first day, we were to land in... allow me to recall properly the names...

Mumbā'i, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Lima, São Paulo, Kārāci, al-Qāhriah, Tōkyō, Bêijīng, Shànghâi, Dubayy, Ťehrân, Ulaan Baatar, Muqdisho, and Zanzibar. Altogether, we were to deposit twelve million troopmales on the first day. Over the next five months, as the planet's weather stayed in our favor, we would deposit as many as an additional three million to select regions. Once it cooled, we would have some of our forces in established regions use starships to fly to Sydney, Jakarta, Kinshasa, Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, Miami, and Bogotá.

When summer came again, we would land the full remaining brunt of our troopmales, fresh reserves numbering thirty million. Chicago, New York City, Cidade de Mexico, Paris, Toronto, London, İstanbul, Seoul, Moskva, Madrid, Pisa, and Oslo. At that point, any parts of the planet still not under our control would be forced to surrender. We estimated that we would be able to conquer the planet within the local year, if the Emperor was on our side. Which, we naturally believed, he was.

And so, the war began on our New Year's Day, your May 30th.

1 Gunpowder had existed as an experimental medicine for approximately four hundred and twelve years before the Race's probes arrived, and as a military tool for three hundred and sixteen.

-/-\\-

**Scrapbook II**

_"I remember it was daytime where I was when they left the Moon and started coming over- I saw the lights in the sky as they made the burns, before me and the boys even got the emergency alert. Man, we hauled ass out of the barracks like we were expecting to see little green men pointing laser guns at us already, even if command said it'd probably be a few hours before they arrived. I was stationed out in Montana, 'bout fifty miles from the biggest city, but you'd think me and the boys were defending DC itself. We yeeted -is that still a thing kids say? Yeah? Yeah, we yeeted our phones in the Faraday boxes they set up, got slapped in so much body armor I felt like a video game boss, got the rifles ready, hopped into our Humvees, and listened to the radio._

_We still didn't know what they looked like at the time, so it was kinda hard to envision what I'd be seeing, if I saw anything. Little green men? Six-armed acid-spitting bug dinosaurs? Hot babes with bulletproof bikinis? Honestly that lack of intel made me more nervous than if I knew what to look out for. I mean, I was only nineteen, my guy! Start of my life and here I was, facing the end of the world. Even though I'd known it'd be coming since I was in middle school, all I could think as the lights got brighter was "Holy fuck, it's actually happening."_

**\- Demian Blanche, retired US Army private**

_"I was working in the factory when the announcement came. They were arriving in six hours, the intercom blared. Everyone, cease your work and go home, then go to the shelters. And we did. For once, there wasn't news that made everyone scream, or throw trash cans through windows. We just calmly walked out, not a word between ourselves. I went home to pick up my mother and grandfather, and then it was off to the shelter. It was beneath an old sandwich shop, the one people in my area were meant to go to. We had made many shelters over the years, and so there was room._

_We put our electronics in the mesh bags they handed out, and simply sat along the wall. There was still no talking beyond some occasional greetings or acknowledgements, especially since there were almost no children there. You'd think there'd be worried whispering, whimpering, praying. Well, there was praying, and there was worry, but it was all silent. Calm, even. I suppose it had to do with the removal of the uncertainty swirling around the Fleet. They had bluntly asked us to surrender, and now we knew what was to happen. It reminds me of something my bà used to say._

_A man is calmest the morning he is to be hanged."_

**- **Hồ Thį Mai, Vietnamese munitions factory worker****

_"Some countries and businesses handed out mesh bags or cages, others had lockers, I think. We knew of the possibility that they may use nuclear weaponry to try and destroy our electronics. We lived far away from the city, so we did not have many, but we had a microwave. The news told us that microwaves can help protect your electronics, so my husband and I- we were too old for the factories or army, too far to go to shelter- we gathered our phones that our son had bought for us, and put them in._

_Then... then my old man of a husband reflexively turned it on. It was only for a second, but that ruined everything._

_I'm surprised my husband didn't try to go out and find the aliens. He must've thought they'd be more merciful to him than I was after that."_

**\- Shaghayegh Dehkordi**

_"You know who must've loved the calm before the war? Whales. Ocean travel is not kind to sea life in general, especially whales. Naval sonar would be so loud they'd sometimes beach themselves to make the sound stop, the whirring of all those engines stressed them out, all that sort of thing._

_You saw it on 9/11- lord that shows just how much a dinosaur I am. Who even cares about that nowadays? Anyway, the weeks after that were gloriously quiet for the poor things, since the attacks halted just about all sea travel. There are actual scientific studies showing a dramatic decrease in hormones produced during times of stress in whale fecal matter._

_Well, the prelude to the war did even more than those old attacks to stop sea travel. Stopped air travel, too. Boats pulled back into harbor, naval vessels went silent in case the aliens could track them... the ocean hasn't been that quiet in centuries. Whales must've loved it. They didn't care about the cause, and even if they knew they probably still wouldn't have cared, because why should they worry about whose in charge of the land? All they must've thought was 'Oh thank Whale Jesus, they've finally shut the fuck up'."_

**\- Maria Espinoza, Mexican marine biologist**

_"It was eerie indeed, watching Tosev Three at night. The lights were much brighter, much more irregular, than what I saw orbiting Home. It looked like your world was on fire._

_Then the lights went away, entire swaths of the planet going dark at once, no more than five minutes from the first to the last. And I found myself much more afraid."_

**\- Orbital Observation Specialist Gniffit**

_"The thing that made me most uncomfortable was that it wasn't making me uncomfortable at all. D-does that make sense? Corvo was the smallest, least populated island in the Açores, and those islands are very small and remote. Four hundred people lived in Corvo before the war. Nighttime was always dark, because everyone turned off their lights. But now, we **had** to do the thing we always did, because now it was to make it harder for the aliens to target us, and to protect electronics. That night could've been the last night on Earth, for all I had known. The biggest, bloodiest, most desperate battles were about to start for the sake of everyone._

_But to me, it looked like just another quiet night in the middle of nowhere, and that made me shiver."_

**\- Ricardo Almeida, fisherman**

_"I was an emergency response technician. That was fancy talk for me wearing a reflective vest and checking people's IDs as I directed crowds to the busses that would take them to shelter. Jakarta was a big city, but we didn't build a lot of shelters in the actual city, because it had bad problems with flooding. That meant getting people who lived in apartment complexes in the city to spread out to the shelters in the outskirts, and people were encouraged to let others sleep in their homes to lessen the strain. We started two days before the war began, a nigh-constant river of bodies leaving._

_I finished my sector at about ten pm or so. It was in the heart of the city's financial district, Setiabudi, where the skyscrapers were all bunched together. By Allah, I was so tired from a twenty hour shift. I remember stretching back, cracking my back, and that's when I saw it. Stars._

_I'd lived in the heart of the city my entire life, and back then the light pollution and the noise was horrible. I'd never seen stars at night. But now? I could see **all** of them. The Milky Way itself, like a road of stars across the sky. The buildings around me, those high-rises that'd be alight with bright neons, were completely dark, like looming mountains in the night. I couldn't hear engines humming, people shouting, anything. It was like I was the last person in a dead city. And I realized that was the case all around the world, that everywhere was as silent as here, almost like a return to some primordial part of our history._

_I got out of there as fast as I could."_

**\- Rama Djajadiningrat**

_"Looks like it's finally time to get this fucking show on the road."_

**\- Anonymous statement that became popular on the internet within the last twelve hours before Landing Day**

-/-\\-

_**You have been reading:** _

_**Worldfall, Chapter Three: Arrival** _


End file.
